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Best Visual Artist of All Time

A visual artist is anyone (including people, animals, groups or companies) that has created a visual artwork.
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Sally Mann is an American photographer, best known for her large black-and-white photographs—at first of her young children, then later of landscapes suggesting decay and death.
Born in Lexington, Virginia, Mann was the third of three children and the only daughter. Her father, Robert S. Munger, was a general practitioner, and her mother, Elizabeth Evans Munger, ran the bookstore at Washington and Lee University in Lexington. Mann graduated from The Putney School in 1969, and attended Bennington College and Friends World College. She earned a B.A., summa cum laude, from Hollins College (now Hollins University) in 1974 and a MA in creative writing in 1975. She took up photography at Putney, where, she claims, her motive was to be alone in the darkroom with her boyfriend. She made her photographic debut at Putney, with an image of a nude classmate. Her father encouraged her interest in photography; His 5x7 camera became the basis of her use of large format cameras today.
After graduation, Mann worked as a photographer at Washington and Lee University. In the mid 1970s she photographed the construction of its new law school building, the Lewis Hall (now the Sydney Lewis Hall), leading

Takashi Murakami (村上 隆, Murakami Takashi, born in Tokyo) is an internationally prolific contemporary Japanese artist. He works in fine arts media—such as painting and sculpture—as well as what is conventionally considered commercial media —fashion, merchandise, and animation— and is known for blurring the line between high and low arts. He coined the term superflat, which describes both the aesthetic characteristics of the Japanese artistic tradition and the nature of post-war Japanese culture and society. Superflat is also used as a moniker to describe Murakami’s own artistic style and that of other Japanese artists he has influenced.
Murakami is the founder and President of Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd., through which he manages the careers of several younger artists and organizes the biannual art fair GEISAI.
Takashi Murakami was born and raised in Tokyo. From early on, he was an enthusiastic follower of animation and manga (Japanese comics), and aspired to one day work in the animation industry. He attended T.U.A Tokyo University of the Arts, originally seeking to acquire the drafting skills necessary to become an animator, but eventually majored in Nihonga, the ‘traditional’ style of

Artworks:Working drawing for Wall Drawing #937: Various shapes in color

Associated periods or movements:Minimalism

Art Forms:Painting

Solomon "Sol" LeWitt (September 9, 1928 – April 8, 2007) was an American artist linked to various movements, including Conceptual art and Minimalism.
LeWitt came to fame in the late 1960s with his wall drawings and "structures" (a term he preferred instead of "sculptures") but was prolific in a wide range of media including drawing, printmaking, photography, and painting. He has been the subject of hundreds of solo exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world since 1965.
LeWitt was born in Hartford, Connecticut to a family of Jewish immigrants from Russia. His mother took him to art classes at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. After receiving a BFA from Syracuse University in 1949, LeWitt traveled to Europe where he was exposed to Old Master painting. Shortly thereafter, he served in the Korean War, first in California, then Japan, and finally Korea. LeWitt moved to New York City in 1953 and set up a studio on the Lower East Side, in the old Ashkenazi Jewish settlement on Hester Street. During this time he studied at the School of Visual Arts while also pursuing his interest in design at Seventeen magazine, where he did paste-ups, mechanicals, and photostats. In 1955, he

Donald Clarence Judd (June 3, 1928 – February 12, 1994) was an American artist associated with minimalism (a term he nonetheless stridently disavowed). In his work, Judd sought autonomy and clarity for the constructed object and the space created by it, ultimately achieving a rigorously democratic presentation without compositional hierarchy. It created an outpouring of seemingly effervescent works that defied the term "minimalism". Nevertheless, he is generally considered the leading international exponent of "minimalism," and its most important theoretician through such seminal writings such as "Specific Objects" (1964).
Judd was born in Excelsior Springs, Missouri. He served in the Army from 1946-1947 as an engineer and in 1948 began his studies in philosophy at the College of William and Mary, later transferring to Columbia University School of General Studies. At Columbia, he earned a degree in philosophy and worked towards a master's in art history under Rudolf Wittkower and Meyer Shapiro. Also at Columbia he attended night classes at the Art Students League of New York. He supported himself by writing art criticism for major American art magazines between 1959 and 1965. In

Jeffrey "Jeff" Wall, OC, RSA (born September 29, 1946) is a Canadian artist best known for his large-scale back-lit cibachrome photographs and art history writing. Wall has been a key figure in Vancouver's art scene since the early-1970s. Early in his career, he helped define the Vancouver School and he has published essays on the work of his colleagues and fellow Vancouverites Rodney Graham, Ken Lum and Ian Wallace. His photographic tableaux often take Vancouver's mixture of natural beauty, urban decay and postmodern and industrial featurelessness as their backdrop.
Wall received his MA from the University of British Columbia in 1970, with a thesis titled, Berlin Dada and the Notion of Context. That same year, Wall stopped making art. With his wife, Jeannette, a native of England whom he had met as a student in Vancouver, and their two young sons, he moved to London to do postgraduate work at the Courtauld Institute from 1970–73, where he studied with Manet expert T.J. Clark. Wall was assistant professor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (1974–75), associate professor at Simon Fraser University (1976–87), taught for many years at the University of British Columbia and

Käthe Kollwitz (July 8, 1867 – April 22, 1945) was a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor whose work offered an eloquent and often searing account of the human condition, and the tragedy of war, in the first half of the 20th century. Her empathy for the less fortunate, expressed most famously through the graphic means of drawing, etching, lithography, and woodcut, embraced the victims of poverty, hunger, and war. Initially her work was grounded in Naturalism, and later took on Expressionistic qualities.
Kollwitz was born as Käthe Schmidt in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia), East Prussia, the fifth child in her family. Her father, Karl Schmidt, was a radical Social democrat who became a mason and house builder. Her mother, Katherina Schmidt, was the daughter of Julius Rupp, a Lutheran pastor who was expelled from the official Evangelical State Church in Prussia and founded an independent congregation. Her education was greatly influenced by her grandfather's lessons in religion and socialism.
Recognizing her talent, Kollwitz's father arranged for her to begin lessons in drawing and copying plaster casts when she was twelve. At sixteen she began making drawings of working

Jan van Eyck (or Johannes de Eyck) (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈjɑn vɑn ˈɛjk]; before c. 1395 – before c. 9 July 1441) was a Flemish painter active in Bruges and is generally considered one of the most significant Northern European painters of the 15th century. The few surviving records indicate that he was born around 1390, most likely in Maaseik. Outside of works completed with his brother Hubert van Eyck and those ascribed to Hand G -believed to be Jan- of the Turin-Milan Hours illuminated manuscript, only about 23 surviving works are attributed to van Eyck, although all are of an exceptionally innovative and technical quality. Little is known of his early life, but his activities following his appointment to the court of Philip the Good c. 1425 are comparatively well documented. Van Eyck had previously served John of Bavaria-Straubing, then ruler of Holland, Hainault and Zeeburg. By this time van Eyck had assembled a workshop and was involved in redecorating the Binnenhof palace in The Hague. After Johns death in 1425 he moved to Bruges and came to the attention of Philip the Good. He served as both court artist and diplomat and became a senior member of the Tournai painters' guild,

Gustav Klimt (July 14, 1862 – February 6, 1918) was an Austrian symbolist painter and one of the most prominent members of the Vienna Secession movement. Klimt is noted for his paintings, murals, sketches, and other art objects. Klimt's primary subject was the female body; his works are marked by a frank eroticism.
Gustav Klimt was born in Baumgarten, near Vienna in Austria-Hungary, the second of seven children—three boys and four girls. All three sons displayed artistic talent early on. Klimt's younger brothers were Ernst Klimt and Georg Klimt. His father, Ernst Klimt the Elder, formerly from Bohemia, was a gold engraver. Ernst married Anna Klimt (née Finster), whose unrealized ambition was to be a musical performer.
Klimt lived in poverty while attending the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts (Kunstgewerbeschule), where he studied architectural painting until 1883. He revered the foremost history painter of the time, Hans Makart. Klimt readily accepted the principles of a conservative training; his early work may be classified as academic. In 1877 his brother Ernst, who, like his father, would become an engraver, also enrolled in the school. The two brothers and their friend Franz

Payut Ngaokrachang (Thai: ปยุต เงากระจ่าง, April 1, 1929 – May 27, 2010) was a Thai cartoonist and animator. He created Thai cinema's first cel-animated feature film, The Adventure of Sudsakorn.
Payut was born at Klong Warl village, Warkoe, Prachuap Khiri Khan Province. As a child, Payut was interested in nang drama (shadow-puppet plays) and Felix the Cat.
In 1944, he enrolled in classes to become an art teacher. Payut studied by correspondence with illustrator Hem Vejakorn, whose work was seen on the covers of 10-satang pulp novels. Through their letters back and forth, Hem introduced Payut to drawing.
"I had been a fan of Khru Hem’s drawings since 1944, when I was 14. So, I wrote him asking to become his student. He was a great teacher and taught me a lot, from how to draw anatomy to getting the right perspective on paintings. I learned all this from his letters," Payut told The Nation newspaper in a 2004 interview.
At age 17, Payut took his first job painting backgrounds for play sets as he traveled around Thailand with theater groups. Payut also worked as a block printer, making etchings, and was employed at an advertising agency.
One of Payut's influences was artist Sanae

Artworks:Panorama of San Francisco from California Street Hill [11 of 11]

Associated periods or movements:

Art Forms:Photography

Eadweard James Muybridge ( /ˌɛdwərd ˈmaɪbrɪdʒ/; 9 April 1830 – 8 May 1904) was an English photographer important for his pioneering work in photographic studies of motion and in motion-picture projection. He adopted the name Eadweard Muybridge, believing it to be the original Anglo-Saxon form of his name. He immigrated to the United States as a young man but remained obscure until 1868, when his large photographs of Yosemite Valley, California, made him world famous. Muybridge is known for his pioneering work on animal locomotion in 1877 and 1878, which used multiple cameras to capture motion in stop-action photographs, and his zoopraxiscope, a device for projecting motion pictures that pre-dated the flexible perforated film strip used in cinematography.
In his earlier years in San Francisco, Muybridge had become known for his landscape photography, particularly of the Yosemite Valley. He also photographed the Tlingit people in Alaska, and was commissioned by the United States Army to photograph the Modoc War in 1873. In 1874 he shot and killed Major Harry Larkyns, his wife's lover, and was acquitted in a jury trial on the grounds of justifiable homicide. He travelled for more than

Lynfield George Ott (April 25, 1926 – April 22, 1998), better known as Lyn Ott, was an American painter and a follower of Meher Baba.
Ott was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania in 1926 to Irene and Lester Ott (vice president of W. T. Grant). Ott was born with retinitis pigmentosa, a hereditary degenerative eye disease that leads almost inevitably to blindness. In spite of this, Ott's father Lester encouraged him to pursue his interest in painting.
Ott graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1947. He established a studio in SoHo in New York City and exhibited in several one-man shows at the Lovisco Gallery in the late 1950s and early 1960s, which received positive reviews.
In 1958, Ott settled in Woodstock, New York and joined the Art Students League of New York. There he began a long-term partnership with fellow painter and spiritual seeker Phyllis Vita Silverman. They had two children, Chris and Leslie, and raised two others, Mimi and Betsy, from Phyllis' previous marriage.
In 1964 Ott and his wife came in contact with the Indian spiritual master Meher Baba. They traveled to India where they met Meher Baba in 1965. In his book, In Quest of the Face of God, Ott wrote that

Samantha "Sam" Taylor-Johnson OBE, (born Samantha Taylor 4 March 1967), known professionally as Sam Taylor-Wood, is an English filmmaker, photographer and visual artist. Her directorial feature film debut came in 2009 with Nowhere Boy, a film based on the childhood experiences of the Beatles songwriter and singer John Lennon. She is one of a group of artists known as the Young British Artists. She is married to English actor Aaron Taylor-Johnson.
Samantha Taylor was born in Croydon, England. Her father, David, left the family when she was nine. Her mother, Geraldine, is a yoga teacher and astrologer. She has one younger sister Ashley, and a maternal step-brother, Kristian. Taylor-Wood grew up near Streatham Common in south London until her parents' divorce. The family then moved to a commune in Sussex, which Taylor-Wood has stated that she "hated". When she was 15, Taylor-Wood's mother and step-father divorced.
She lived with her step-father until she was 16, before moving out to live on her own in Hastings-by-the-Sea.
Taylor-Wood began exhibiting fine art photography in the early-1990s. One collaboration with Henry Bond, titled 26 October 1993, featured Bond and Taylor-Wood

Martiros Saryan (Armenian: Մարտիրոս Սարյան) (28 February [O.S. 16 February] 1880, Nor Nakhichevan, Russian Empire — 5 May 1972, Yerevan, Armenia) was an Armenian painter.
He was born into an Armenian family in Nor Nakhijevan (now part of Rostov-on-Don, Russia). In 1895, aged 15, he completed the Nakhichevan school and from 1897 to 1904 studied at the Moscow School of Arts, including in the workshops of Valentin Serov and Konstantin Korovin. He was heavily influenced by the work of Paul Gauguin and Henri Matisse. He exhibited his works in various shows. He had works shown at the Blue Rose Exhibit in Moscow.
He first visited Armenia, then part of the Russian Empire, in 1901, visiting Lori, Shirak, Echmiadzin, Haghpat, Sanahin, Yerevan and Sevan. He composed his first landscapes depicting Armenia: "Makravank," 1902; "Aragats," 1902; "Buffalo. Sevan", 1903; "Evening in the Garden," 1903; "In the Armenian village", 1903, etc. which were highly praised in the Moscow press.
From 1910 to 1913 he traveled extensively in Turkey, Egypt and Iran. In 1915 he went to Echmiadzin to help refugees who had fled from the Armenian genocide in the Ottoman Empire. In 1916 he traveled to Tiflis (now

Stanisław Samostrzelnik (Stanisław z Krakowa, Stanisław z Mogiły, c. 1490–1541) was a Polish Renaissance painter, miniaturist, decorator and Cistercian monk from Kraków, Poland. He was the first Polish painter known by name who painted in the Renaissance style. There are many frescos by him in the churches of southern Poland. The most distinguished can be seen in the Cistercian monastery in Mogiła. He is also recognized for his portrait of Bishop Piotr Tomicki in the portraits gallery of the St. Francis of Assisi's Church of Kraków.
Stanisław Samostrzelnik was a son of Piotr and Anna Samostrzelnik, who lived in the Kraków mansion of Cistercian Abbot of Koprzywnica. His father was probably a manufacturer of crossbows and bows, hence the name in old Polish (samostrzelnik from Latin sagittator, a crossbow maker). Samostrzelnik, after passing the necessary examinations, entered the Cistercian Abbey in Mogiła near Kraków, which at that time was a separate town, and today the settlement of Kraków, Nowa Huta. Thanks to the Abbot's protection, he quickly advanced to exposed monastic position of illuminator. The first fully proven chronological information about him appears in the 1506,

Marcel Janco (German: [maɐ̯ˈsɛl ˈjaŋko], French: [maʁsɛl ʒɑ̃ko], common rendition of the Romanian name Marcel Hermann Iancu pronounced [marˈt͡ʃel ˈherman ˈjaŋku], last name also Ianco, Janko or Jancu; May 24, 1895 – April 21, 1984) was a Romanian and Israeli visual artist, architect and art theorist. He was the co-inventor of Dadaism and a leading exponent of Constructivism in Eastern Europe. In the 1910s, he co-edited, with Ion Vinea and Tristan Tzara, the Romanian art magazine Simbolul. Janco was a practitioner of Art Nouveau, Futurism and Expressionism before contributing his painting and stage design to Tzara's literary Dadaism. He parted with Dada in 1919, when he and painter Hans Arp founded a Constructivist circle, Das Neue Leben.
Reunited with Vinea, he founded Contimporanul, the influential tribune of the Romanian avant-garde, advocating a mix of Constructivism, Futurism and Cubism. At Contimporanul, Janco expounded a "revolutionary" vision of urban planning. He designed some of the most innovative landmarks of downtown Bucharest. He worked in many art forms, including illustration, sculpture and oil painting.
Janco was one of the leading Romanian Jewish intellectuals of

Robert Campin (c. 1375 – 26 April 1444), now usually identified as the artist known as the Master of Flémalle, is usually considered the first great master of Flemish and Early Netherlandish painting. This had been a matter of controversy for decades; Campin's life is relatively well documented for the period, but no works in assessable condition could be securely connected with him, whilst a corpus of work had been attached to the unidentified "Master of Flémalle", named after the supposed origin of a work.
Campin first appears as settled in Tournai from the archives of 1405–6, as a free master of the guild of painters, and there has been a lot of speculation about his origin and birthplace which is actually unknown. However, in 1410 he bought citizenship, which suggests he was not born there. He eventually attained the office of dean of the guild, and wardenship of a church and other civic offices, and was running a large workshop. By 1432, however, he lost his civic positions because of scandals, and probably his role in political disturbances in the city. In 1429 he was found guilty of withholding evidence, and sentenced to go on a pilgrimage, and in 1432 was convicted of

Wordsworth Donisthorpe (Leeds, 24 March 1847 – Shottermill, 30 January 1914) was an English individualist anarchist and inventor, pioneer of cinematography and chess enthusiast. His father was George E. Donisthorpe, an inventor as well, his brother, Horace Donisthorpe, was a myrmecologist.
In 1885 Donisthorpe was co-founder of the British Chess Association and the British Chess Club.
Donisthorpe filed for a patent in 1876, for a film camera, which he named a "kinesigraph." The object of the invention was to:
Although unsuccessfully at first, in 1890 he produced, together with his cousin W. C. Crofts, a moving picture of London's Trafalgar Square. In 1889 they already patented this camera, and the projector necessary to show the motion frames.

Andrea del Sarto (Italian: [anˈdrɛːa del ˈsarto]; 1486–1530) was an Italian painter from Florence, whose career flourished during the High Renaissance and early Mannerism. Though highly regarded during his lifetime as an artist senza errori ("without errors"), his renown was eclipsed after his death by that of his contemporaries, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Raphael.
Andrea was born Andrea d'Agnolo di Francesco di Luca di Paolo del Migliore in Florence on July 16, 1486. Since his father, Agnolo, was a tailor (sarto), he became known as "del Sarto" ("tailor's son"). Since 1677 some have attributed the surname Vannucchi with little documentation. By 1494 Andrea was apprenticed to a goldsmith, and then to a woodcarver and painter named Gian Barile, with whom he remained until 1498. According to Vasari, he then apprenticed to Piero di Cosimo, and later with Raffaellino del Garbo (Carli).
Andrea and an older friend Franciabigio decided to open a joint studio at a lodging together in the Piazza del Grano. The first product of their partnership may have been the Baptism of Christ for the Florentine Compagnia dello Scalzo, the beginning of a monochrome fresco series. By the time

Constantine Andreou (Also: Costas Andreou, Kostas Andreou; French: Constantin Andréou, Costas Andréou; Greek: Κωνσταντίνος Ανδρέου, Κώστας Ανδρέου) (March 24, 1917 – October 8, 2007) was a painter and sculptor of Greek origin with a highly successful career that spanned six decades. Andreou has been praised by many as an eminent figure in international art of the 20th century.
Constantine Andreou was born in São Paulo, Brazil in 1917 to Greek parents who had immigrated to Brazil a few years prior.
In 1925, his family moved back to Greece where he settled in Athens until the end of World War II. During these years, Andreou dabbled in crafts and for a period worked as a carpenter making furniture while studying technical design. He graduated in 1935. In the same year, he started his study of sculpture, the art form for which he would be most known later.
In 1939, Andreou participated at the Panellinio (Πανελλήνιο), but the judges disqualified his three sculptures. In 1942], he tried again at the same competition and with the same artwork. The pieces were so lifelike, he was accused of cheating by copying nature. Three major personalities of the time in Greece, Memos Makris, John

John Singleton Copley (1738 – 1815) was an American painter, born presumably in Boston, Massachusetts, and a son of Richard and Mary Singleton Copley, both Irish. He is famous for his portrait paintings of important figures in colonial New England, depicting in particular middle-class subjects. His paintings were innovative in their tendency to depict artifacts relating to these individuals' lives.
Copley's mother owned a tobacco shop on Long Wharf. The parents, who according to the artist's granddaughter, Martha Babcock Amory, came to Boston in 1736, were "engaged in trade, like almost all the inhabitants of the North American colonies at that time". The father was from Limerick; the mother, of the Singletons of County Clare, a family of Lancashire origin. Letters from John Singleton, Mrs. Copley's father, are in the Copley-Pelham collection. Richard Copley, described as a tobacconist, is said by several biographers to have arrived in Boston in ill health and to have gone, about the time of John's birth, to the West Indies, where he died. William H. Whitmore gives his death as of 1748, the year of Mrs. Copley's remarriage. James Bernard Cullen says: "Richard Copley was in poor

Emil Nolde (7 August 1867 – 13 April 1956) was a German painter and printmaker. He was one of the first Expressionists, a member of Die Brücke, and is considered to be one of the great oil painting and watercolour painters of the 20th century. He is known for his vigorous brushwork and expressive choice of colors. Golden yellows and deep reds appear frequently in his work, giving a luminous quality to otherwise somber tones. His watercolors include vivid, brooding storm-scapes and brilliant florals.
Nolde's intense preoccupation with the subject of flowers reflect his continuing interest in the art of Vincent Van Gogh.
Emil Nolde was born as Emil Hansen near the village of Nolde (since 1920 part of the municipality of Burkal in Southern Jutland, Denmark), in the Prussian Duchy of Schleswig. He grew up on a farm; his parents, devout Protestants, were Frisian and Danish peasants. Between 1884 and 1888, he trained as a craftsman and worked in woodcarving, and worked in furniture factories as a young adult. In 1889, he gained entrance into the School of Applied Arts in Karlsruhe before becoming a drawing-instructor in Switzerland from 1892 to 1898, eventually leaving this job to

Masolino da Panicale (nickname of Tommaso di Cristoforo Fini; c. 1383 – c. 1447) was an Italian painter. His best known works are probably his collaborations with Masaccio: Madonna with Child and St. Anne (1424) and the frescoes in the Brancacci Chapel (1424–1428).
Masolino ("Little Tom") was born in Panicale. He may have been an assistant to Ghiberti in Florence between 1403 and 1407. In 1423, he joined the Florentine guild Arte dei Medici e Speziali (Doctors and Apothecaries), which included painters as an independent branch. He may have been the first artist to create of oil paintings in the 1420s, rather than Jan van Eyck in the 1430s, as was previously supposed. He spent many years traveling, including a trip to Hungary from September 1425 to July 1427 under the patronage of Pipo of Ozora, a mercenary captain. He also worked in Rome and Todi. He spent his later years, after 1435, working for Cardinal Branda Castiglione in Castiglione Olona.
Complete works
In Florence:
In Empoli:
In Rome:
In Castiglione Olona, where his patron was Branda da Castiglioney:
In Naples:
In France:
In Germany:
In the United States:
Dispersed pieces of works

Nicolas Poussin (French: [nikɔlɑ pusɛ̃]; 15 June 1594 – 19 November 1665) was a French painter in the classical style. His work predominantly features clarity, logic, and order, and favors line over color. His work serves as an alternative to the dominant Baroque style of the 17th century. Until the 20th century he remained the major inspiration for such classically oriented artists as Jacques-Louis David, Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres and Paul Cézanne.
He spent most of his working life in Rome, except for a short period when Cardinal Richelieu ordered him back to France to serve as First Painter to the King.
Nicolas Poussin's early biographer was his friend Giovanni Pietro Bellori, who relates that Poussin was born near Les Andelys in Normandy and that he received an education that included some Latin, which would stand him in good stead. Early sketches attracted the notice of Quentin Varin, a local painter, whose pupil Poussin became, until he ran away to Paris at the age of eighteen. There he entered the studios of the Flemish painter Ferdinand Elle and then of Georges Lallemand, both minor masters now remembered for having tutored Poussin. He found French art in a stage of

Edward Alexander Wadsworth (29 October 1889 – 21 June 1949) was an English artist, most famous for his close association with Vorticism. He painted, often in tempera, coastal views, abstracts, portraits and still-life. He was also an engraver on wood and copper. In the First World War he designed dazzle camouflage for the Royal Navy, and after the war he continued to paint nautical themes.
Wadsworth was born on 29 October 1889 in Cleckheaton, West Yorkshire, and was educated at Fettes College in Edinburgh. He studied engineering in Munich between 1906-7, where he studied art in his spare time at the Knirr School. This provoked a change of course, as he attended Bradford School of Art before earning a scholarship to the Slade School of Art, London. His contemporaries at the school included Stanley Spencer, CRW Nevinson, Mark Gertler, Dora Carrington and David Bomberg.
Wadsworth's work was included in Roger Fry's second Post-Impressionism Exhibition at The Grafton Galleries, 1912, in London, but he changed allegiance shortly after through friendship with Wyndham Lewis, and exhibited some futurist-derived paintings at the Futurist Exhibitions at the Doré Gallery. Although a member of

Egon Schiele (help·info) (German pronunciation: [ˈʃiːlə], approximately SHEE-luh; June 12, 1890 – October 31, 1918) was an Austrian painter. A protégé of Gustav Klimt, Schiele was a major figurative painter of the early 20th century. His work is noted for its intensity, and the many self-portraits the artist produced. The twisted body shapes and the expressive line that characterize Schiele's paintings and drawings mark the artist as an early exponent of Expressionism.
Schiele was born in 1890 in Tulln on the Danube. His father, Adolph Schiele, was the station master of the Tulln station in the Austrian State Railways; his mother Marie, née Soukupová, was a Czech from Český Krumlov (Krumau), in southern Bohemia. As a child, Schiele was fascinated by trains, and would spend many hours drawing them, to the point where his father felt obliged to destroy his sketchbooks. When he was 11 years old, Schiele moved to the nearby city of Krems (and later to Klosterneuburg) to attend secondary school. To those around him, Schiele was regarded as a strange child. Shy and reserved, he did poorly at school except in athletics and drawing, and was usually in classes made up of younger pupils. He

Jean-Antoine Watteau (French pronunciation: [ʒan‿ɑ̃twan wato]; October 10, 1684 – July 18, 1721) was a French painter whose brief career spurred the revival of interest in colour and movement (in the tradition of Correggio and Rubens). He revitalized the waning Baroque style, and indeed moved it to the less severe, more naturalistic, less formally classical Rococo.
Watteau is credited with inventing the genre of fêtes galantes: scenes of bucolic and idyllic charm, suffused with an air of theatricality. Some of his best known subjects were drawn from the world of Italian comedy and ballet.
Watteau was born in the town of Valenciennes, which had recently passed from the Spanish Netherlands to France. His father was a master tiler. Showing an early interest in painting, he was apprenticed to Jacques-Albert Gérin, a local painter. Having little to learn from Gérin, Watteau left for Paris in about 1702. There he found employment in a workshop at Pont Notre-Dame, making copies of popular genre paintings in the Flemish and Dutch tradition; it was in that period that he developed his characteristic sketchlike technique.
In 1703 he was employed as an assistant by the painter Claude Gillot,

Paolo Veronese (1528 – 19 April 1588) was an Italian painter of the Renaissance in Venice, famous for paintings such as The Wedding at Cana and The Feast in the House of Levi. He adopted the name Paolo Cagliari or Paolo Caliari, and became known as "Veronese" from his birthplace in Verona.
Veronese, Titian, and Tintoretto constitute the triumvirate of pre-eminent Venetian painters of the late Renaissance (16th century). Veronese is known as a supreme colorist, and for his illusionistic decorations in both fresco and oil. His most famous works are elaborate narrative cycles, executed in a dramatic and colorful Mannerist style, full of majestic architectural settings and glittering pageantry. His large paintings of biblical feasts executed for the refectories of monasteries in Venice and Verona are especially notable. His brief testimony with the Inquisition is often quoted for its insight into contemporary painting technique.
The census in Verona attests that Veronese was born sometime in 1528 to a stonecutter named Gabriele, and his wife Catherina. By the age of fourteen Veronese apprenticed with the local master Antonio Badile, and perhaps with Giovanni Francesco Caroto. An

Ștefan Luchian (Romanian pronunciation: [ʃteˈfan lukiˈan], last name also spelled Lukian; 1 February 1868 – 28 June 1917) was a Romanian painter, famous for his landscapes and still life works.
He was born in Ștefănești, a village of Botoșani County, as the son of Major Dumitru Luchian and of Elena Chiriacescu. The Luchian family moved to Bucharest in 1873 and his mother desired that he would follow his father's path and join the Military School. Instead, in 1885, Luchian joined the painting class at the Fine Arts School, where he was encouraged to pursue a career in art by Nicolae Grigorescu, whose work was to have a major impact on his entire creative life.
Starting in autumn of 1889 Luchian studied for two semesters at the Munich Fine Arts Academy, where he created copies of the works by Correggio and Rembrandt housed in the Kunstareal. After his return to Romania, he took part in the first exhibition of the Cercul Artistic art group.
He showed himself unable to accept the academic guidelines imposed by the Bavarian and Romanian schools. The following year, he left for Paris, where he studied at the Académie Julian, and, although taught by the academic artist William-Adolphe

Donato Bramante (1444 – 11 March 1514) was an Italian architect, who introduced Renaissance architecture to Milan and the High Renaissance style to Rome, where his plan for St. Peter's Basilica formed the basis of design executed by Michelangelo. His Tempietto (San Pietro in Montorio) marked the beginning of the High Renaissance in Rome (1502) when Alexander VI appointed him to build a sanctuary that allegedly marked the spot where Peter was crucified.
Bramante was born in Monte Asdrualdo (now Fermignano), under name Donato di Pascuccio d'Antonio, near Urbino: here, in 1467 Luciano Laurana was adding to the Palazzo Ducale an arcaded courtyard and other features that seemed to have the true ring of a reborn antiquity to Federico da Montefeltro's ducal palace.
Bramante's architecture has eclipsed his painting skills: he knew the painters Melozzo da Forlì and Piero della Francesca well, who were interested in the rules of perspective and illusionistic features in Mantegna's painting. Around 1474, Bramante moved to Milan, a city with a deep Gothic architectural tradition, and built several churches in the new Antique style. The Duke, Ludovico Sforza, made him virtually his court

Albert Marquet (27 March 1875 – 14 June 1947) was a French painter, associated with the Fauvist movement.
Marquet was born in 1875 at Bordeaux. In 1890 he moved to Paris to attend the Ecole des Arts Decoratifs, where he met Henri Matisse. They were roommates for a time, and they influenced each other's work. Marquet began studies in 1892 at the École des Beaux-Arts under Gustave Moreau, a symbolist artist who was a follower of the Romantic tradition of Eugène Delacroix.
In these years, Marquet exhibited paintings at the Salon des Indépendants. Although he did not sell many paintings, the artistic community of Paris became aware of his work. His early compositions were characterised by a clear and painterly Fauvist approach, in which he had a fine control of the drawing and responded to light, not only by intensifying the strongest tones, but also by seeing the weaker ones in coloristic terms.
In 1905 he exhibited at the Salon d'Automne where his paintings were put together with those of Henri Matisse, Maurice de Vlaminck, André Derain, Othon Friesz, Georges Rouault, Raoul Dufy, Henri Manguin, Georges Braque, Louis Valtat, Georges Dufrénoy and Jean Puy.
Dismayed by the intense

Claes Oldenburg (born January 28, 1929) is an American sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically featuring very large replicas of everyday objects. Another theme in his work is soft sculpture versions of everyday objects. Many of his works were made in collaboration with his wife, Coosje van Bruggen, who died in 2009 after 32 years of marriage. Oldenburg lives and works in New York.
Claes Oldenburg was born on January 28, 1929 in Stockholm, he was the son of a Swedish diplomat stationed in New York. In 1936 his father was appointed Consul General of Sweden to Chicago where Oldenburg grew up, attending the Latin School of Chicago. He studied literature and art history at Yale University from 1946 to 1950, then returned to Chicago where he took classes at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. While further developing his craft, he worked as a reporter at the City News Bureau of Chicago. He also opened his own studio and, in 1953, became a naturalized citizen of the United States. In 1956, he moved to New York, working part-time in the library of the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration.
Oldenburg's first recorded sales of artworks were at the

Ford Madox Brown (16 April 1821 – 6 October 1893) was an English painter of moral and historical subjects, notable for his distinctively graphic and often Hogarthian version of the Pre-Raphaelite style. Arguably, his most notable painting was Work. Brown spent the latter years of his life painting The Manchester Murals for Manchester Town Hall which depicted Mancunian history.
Brown was born in Calais and studied art in Antwerp under Egide Charles Gustave Wappers. In 1843 he submitted work to the Westminster Cartoon Competition, for compositions to decorate the new Palace of Westminster. He was not successful. His early works were, however, greatly admired by the young Dante Gabriel Rossetti, who asked him to become his tutor. Through Rossetti, Brown came into contact with the artists who went on to form the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB). Though closely linked to them, he was never actually a member of the brotherhood itself. Nevertheless, he remained close to Rossetti, with whom he also joined William Morris's design company, Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., in 1861. He was a close friend of the landscape artist Henry Mark Anthony. Brown was also the main organiser of the

Wilson Alwyn "Snowflake" Bentley (February 9, 1865 – December 23, 1931), born in Jericho, Vermont, is one of the first known photographers of snowflakes. He perfected a process of catching flakes on black velvet in such a way that their images could be captured before they either melted or sublimated.
Bentley was born on February 9, 1865. He first became interested in snow crystals as a teenager on his family farm. He tried to draw what he saw through an old microscope given to him by his mother when he was fifteen. The snowflakes were too complex to record before they melted, so he attached a bellows camera to a compound microscope and, after much experimentation, photographed his first snowflake on January 15, 1885.
He would capture over 5,000 images of crystals in his lifetime. Each crystal was caught on a blackboard and transferred rapidly to a microscope slide. Even at subzero temperatures, snowflakes are ephemeral because they sublime.
Bentley poetically described snowflakes as "tiny miracles of beauty" and snow crystals as "ice flowers." Despite these poetic descriptions, Bentley brought a highly objective eye to his work, similar to the German photographer Karl Blossfeldt

Artworks:Alfred Stieglitz, an American Place, New York , from Portfolio One: Twelve ...

Associated periods or movements:

Art Forms:Photography

Ansel Easton Adams (February 20, 1902 – April 22, 1984) was an American photographer and environmentalist, best known for his black-and-white photographs of the American West, especially in Yosemite National Park.
With Fred Archer, Adams developed the Zone System as a way to determine proper exposure and adjust the contrast of the final print. The resulting clarity and depth characterized his photographs and the work of those to whom he taught the system. Adams primarily used large-format cameras despite their size, weight, setup time, and film cost, because their high resolution helped ensure sharpness in his images.
Adams founded the Group f/64 along with fellow photographers Willard Van Dyke and Edward Weston. Adams's photographs are reproduced on calendars, posters, and in books, making his photographs widely distributed.
Adams was born in the Western Addition of San Francisco, California, to distinctly upper-class parents Charles Hitchcock Adams and Olive Bray Adams. He was an only child and was named after his uncle Ansel Easton. His mother's family came from Baltimore and his maternal grandfather had a successful freight-hauling business, but squandered his wealth in failed

Claude Monet (French pronunciation: [klod mɔnɛ/mɔne]) (14 November 1840 – 5 December 1926) was a founder of French impressionist painting, and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement's philosophy of expressing one's perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plein-air landscape painting. The term Impressionism is derived from the title of his painting Impression, Sunrise (Impression, soleil levant).
Claude Monet was born on 14 November 1840 on the 5th floor of 45 rue Laffitte, in the 9th arrondissement of Paris. He was the second son of Claude Adolphe Monet and Louise Justine Aubrée Monet, both of them second-generation Parisians. On 20 May 1841, he was baptized in the local parish church, Notre-Dame-de-Lorette, as Oscar-Claude, but his parents called him simply Oscar. In 1845, his family moved to Le Havre in Normandy. His father wanted him to go into the family grocery business, but Monet wanted to become an artist. His mother was a singer.
On 1 April 1851, Monet entered Le Havre secondary school of the arts. Locals knew him well for his charcoal caricatures, which he would sell for ten to twenty francs. Monet also undertook his first drawing lessons

Kiki Smith (born January 18, 1954, in Nuremberg, Germany) is an American artist classified as a feminist artist, a movement with beginnings in the 20th century. Her Body Art is imbued with political significance, undermining the traditional erotic representations of women by male artists, and often exposes the inner biological systems of females as a metaphor for hidden social issues. Her work also often includes the themes of birth and regeneration, as well as sustenance, and frequently has Catholic allusions. Smith has also been active in debate over controversies such as AIDS, gender, race, and battered women.
Smith grew up in South Orange, New Jersey and attended Columbia High School.
Kiki Smith began sculpting in the late 1970s. She is best known for her sculptures; however, she creates pieces in a variety of media. She was an active member of the artists' group Colab.
Her father was the artist Tony Smith and her mother the actress and opera singer Jane Lawrence Smith. They were both religious in some sense; her mother was a converted Hindu and Catholic, and her father was raised by Jesuits. Smith describes herself as spiritual, saying that, "the most important part of my

Charles Gleyre (full name Marc Gabriel Charles Gleyre) (Chevilly, Vaud canton, 2 May 1806 – 5 May 1874), was a Swiss artist. He took over the studio of Paul Delaroche in 1843 and taught a number of younger artists who became prominent, including Claude Monet, Pierre Auguste Renoir, Alfred Sisley and James Abbott McNeill Whistler.
His father and mother died when he was eight or nine years of age; and he was brought up by an uncle in Lyon, France, who sent him to the industrial school of that city.
Going to Paris in his late teens, he spent four years in intense artistic study. The following four years Gleyre spent in meditative inactivity in Italy, where he became acquainted with Horace Vernet and Louis Léopold Robert; and six years more were spent wandering in Greece, Egypt, Nubia and Syria. At Cairo he was attacked with ophthalmia, or inflammation of the eye, and in Lebanon he was struck down by fever. He returned to Lyons in shattered health.
On his recovery he proceeded to Paris, and, establishing a modest studio in the rue de Université, began carefully to work out the ideas which had been slowly shaping themselves in his mind. Mention is made of two decorative panels Diana

Elito V. "Amangpintor" Circa (born 28 January 1970) is a Filipino folk painter.
Circa was born in Pantabangan, Nueva Ecija in the Philippines and began painting at the age of ten. His hometown was permanently flooded in his early childhood to give way to the construction of a dam. His family was relocated to higher ground, where he could see the belfry of the town's 18th-century church resurface when the reservoir water level fell each summer. These events influenced his later work.
Though lacking in formal art training, Circa continued to paint as a student. His subjects, mostly depicting legends and memories of his old hometown and province, include his signature series on Minggan, a mythical giant who tried to stop the river in Pantabangan from flowing, and another series on the evacuation of the townspeople during the construction of the dam. His work has been exhibited locally and throughout the province in schools, universities and malls.
Circa has received local recognition both at the provincial and regional levels. As tourism adviser of his hometown, he has spearheaded the collection of artifacts from the old town. He has also promoted the town’s history together with its

Frederick Carl Frieseke (April 7, 1874 – August 24, 1939) was an American Impressionist painter who spent most of his life as an expatriate in France. An influential member of the Giverny art colony, his paintings often concentrated on various effects of dappled sunlight. He is especially known for painting female subjects, both indoors and out.
In 1858, Frederick Carl Frieseke's grandparents, Frederick Frieseke and his wife, emigrated from Pritzerbe (near Brandenburg, Germany) with their sons, including Herman Carl. They settled in the small central Michigan town of Owosso. Herman served in the Union Army then returned to Owosso, where he established a brick manufacturing business. He married Eva Graham and in 1871 their daughter Edith was born. Their son, Frederick Carl, was born in Owosso in 1874. Eva died in 1880 when Frederick was six years old, and in about 1881 the family moved to Florida. Herman started another brick manufacturing business in Jacksonville. The four years in Florida left an enduring impression on young Frederick; years later, when he contemplated a return to the United States from Europe, he concentrated on Florida.
Frederick's aunt recounted how, unlike

Gabriele Münter (19 February 1877 – 19 May 1962) was a German expressionist painter who was at the forefront of the Munich avant-garde in the early 20th century. Artists and writers associated with German Expressionism shared a rebellious attitude (influenced by the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche) toward the materialism and mores of German imperial and bourgeois society. German Expressionistic art was an exegetic (and at times agonizing) reaction against the ambiguities and formalism of pre-World War I society. Its radical art and avant-garde mentality sought to end the alienation of painting from society.
Münter was born to upper middle class parents in Berlin. Regardless of the times, her family supported her desires to become an artist. She began to draw as a child. As she was growing up, she had a private tutor, and took classes at the Woman’s Artist School, since she was not allowed to enroll in the German Academies because of her gender. She didn’t feel challenged by her current school, so she decided to take her studies elsewhere. Both of her parents had died by the time she was twenty-one, and she was living at home with no occupation. In 1898, she decided to take a trip

Mary Stevenson Cassatt ( /kəˈsæt/; May 22, 1844 – June 14, 1926) was an American painter and printmaker. She lived much of her adult life in France, where she first befriended Edgar Degas and later exhibited among the Impressionists. Cassatt often created images of the social and private lives of women, with particular emphasis on the intimate bonds between mothers and children.
She was described by Gustave Geffroy in 1894 as one of "les trois grandes dames" of Impressionism alongside Marie Bracquemond and Berthe Morisot.
Cassatt was born in Allegheny City, Pennsylvania, which is now part of Pittsburgh. She was born into an upper-middle-class family: her father, Robert Simpson Cassat (later Cassatt), was a successful stockbroker and land speculator, and her mother, Katherine Kelso Johnston, came from a banking family. Katherine Cassatt, educated and very well read, had a profound influence on her daughter. To that effect, Cassatt's lifelong friend Louisine Havemeyer wrote in her memoirs: "Anyone who had the privilege of knowing Mary Cassatt's mother would know at once that it was from her and her alone that [Mary] inherited her ability." The ancestral name had been Cossart. Cassatt

ZEPHYR, born Andrew Witten, is a graffiti artist, lecturer and author from New York City. He began creating graffiti in 1975 and first signed using the name "Zephyr" in 1977. He has been identified as a graffiti "elder", who along with Futura 2000, Blade, PHASE 2, CASH, Lady Pink and TAKI 183 invented styles and standards "that continue to be used and expanded upon today".
Much of Zephyr's original work was applied on subway trains. Witten has commented on this period of his work:
Witten was part of the first wave of graffiti artists to make the transition to galleries, collectors and commercial work. In the early 80s, he showed at NYC galleries specialized in graffiti, such as the FUN Gallery and 51X. His art was part of a five-man show including Fab Five Freddy, Dominique Philbert, Futura 2000 and Dondi White that toured Japan in 1983. In 2005, he was included in the East Village USA show held at The New Museum.
His works can be seen in the Hip-hop culture documentary Style Wars and he was featured as himself in the landmark hip-hop motion picture Wild Style. He is co-author of a 2001 biography of fellow graffiti artist, Dondi White: Dondi White Style Master General: The Life of

Donato di Niccolò di Betto Bardi (circa 1386 – December 13, 1466), also known as Donatello, was an early Renaissance Italian painter and sculptor from Florence. He is, in part, known for his work in bas-relief, a form of shallow relief sculpture that, in Donatello's case, incorporated significant 15th-century developments in perspectival illusionism.
Donatello was the son of Niccolò di Betto Bardi, who was a member of the Florentine Wool Combers Guild, and was born in Florence, most likely in the year 1386. Donatello was educated in the house of the Martelli family. He apparently received his early artistic training in a goldsmith's workshop, and then worked briefly in the studio of Lorenzo Ghiberti.
While undertaking study and excavations with Filippo Brunelleschi in Rome (1404–1407), work that gained the two men the reputation of treasure seekers, Donatello made a living by working at goldsmiths' shops. Their Roman sojourn was decisive for the entire development of Italian art in the 15th century, for it was during this period that Brunelleschi undertook his measurements of the Pantheon dome and of other Roman buildings. Brunelleschi's buildings and Donatello's sculptures are

Edward Hopper (July 22, 1882 – May 15, 1967) was a prominent American realist painter and printmaker. While he was most popularly known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching. Both in his urban and rural scenes, his spare and finely calculated renderings reflected his personal vision of modern American life.
Hopper was born in upper Nyack, New York, a yacht-building center on the Hudson River north of New York City. He was one of two children of a comfortably well-off, middle-class family. His parents, of mostly Dutch ancestry, were Garret Henry Hopper, a dry-goods merchant, and his wife Elizabeth Griffiths Smith. Though not as successful as his forebears, Garrett provided well for his two children with considerable help from his wife’s inheritance. He retired at age forty-nine. Edward and his only sister Marion attended both private and public schools. They were raised in a strict Baptist home. His father had a mild nature, and the household was dominated by women: Hopper's mother, grandmother, sister, and maid. His birthplace and boyhood home was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2000. Today the house is

Hugo van der Goes (c. 1440 – 1482/1483) was a Flemish painter. He was, along with Jan van Eyck, Rogier van der Weyden, Hans Memling and Gerard David, one of the most important of the Early Netherlandish painters.
Born in Ghent, van der Goes was inlisted as a member of the painters' guild of Ghent as a master in 1467. The following year he was involved in the decoration of the town of Bruges in celebration of the marriage between Charles the Bold and Margaret of York. He provided heraldic decorations for Charles's joyeuse entrée to Ghent in 1469 and later in 1472. He was elected dean of the Ghent guild in 1473 or 1474.
In 1475, or some years later, Hugo entered Roodklooster, a monastery near Brussels belonging to the Windesheim Congregation, and professed there as a frater conversus. He continued to paint, and remained at Roodklooster until his death in 1482 or 1483. In 1480 he was called to the town of Leuven to evaluate the Justice Scenes left unfinished by the painter Dieric Bouts on his death in 1475. Shortly after this, Hugo, returning with other members of his monastery from a trip to Cologne, fell into a state of suicidal gloom, declaring himself to be damned. After returning

Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres (French: [ʒan‿oɡyst dɔminik ɛ̃ɡʁ]; 29 August 1780 – 14 January 1867) was a French Neoclassical painter. Although he considered himself to be a painter of history in the tradition of Nicolas Poussin and Jacques-Louis David, by the end of his life it was Ingres's portraits, both painted and drawn, that were recognized as his greatest legacy.
A man profoundly respectful of the past, he assumed the role of a guardian of academic orthodoxy against the ascendant Romantic style represented by his nemesis Eugène Delacroix. His exemplars, he once explained, were "the great masters which flourished in that century of glorious memory when Raphael set the eternal and incontestable bounds of the sublime in art ... I am thus a conservator of good doctrine, and not an innovator." Nevertheless, modern opinion has tended to regard Ingres and the other Neoclassicists of his era as embodying the Romantic spirit of his time, while his expressive distortions of form and space make him an important precursor of modern art.
Ingres was born in Montauban, Tarn-et-Garonne, France, the first of seven children (five of whom survived infancy) of Jean-Marie-Joseph Ingres

Camille Pissarro (French pronunciation: [ka'mij pisa'ʁo]) (10 July 1830 – 13 November 1903) was a French Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist painter born on the island of St Thomas (now in the US Virgin Islands, but then in the Danish West Indies). His importance resides in his contributions to both Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. Pissarro studied from great forerunners, including Gustave Courbet and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. He later studied and worked alongside Georges Seurat and Paul Signac when he took on the Neo-Impressionist style at the age of 54.
In 1873 he helped establish a collective society of fifteen aspiring artists, becoming the “pivotal” figure in holding the group together and encouraging the other members. Art historian John Rewald called Pissarro the “dean of the Impressionist painters", not only because he was the oldest of the group, but also "by virtue of his wisdom and his balanced, kind, and warmhearted personality”. Cézanne said "he was a father for me. A man to consult and a little like the good Lord," and he was also one of Gauguin's masters. Renoir referred to his work as “revolutionary”, through his artistic portrayals of the "common man", as

Maurice Utrillo (French: [mɔʁis ytʁijo]), born Maurice Valadon (26 December 1883 – 5 November 1955), was a French painter who specialized in cityscapes. Born in the Montmartre quarter of Paris, France, Utrillo is one of the few famous painters of Montmartre who were born there.
Utrillo was the son of the artist Suzanne Valadon (born Marie-Clémentine Valadon), who was then an eighteen-year-old artist's model. She never revealed who was the father of her child; speculation exists that he was the offspring from a liaison with an equally young amateur painter named Boissy, or with the well established painter, Pierre-Cécile Puvis de Chavannes, or even with Renoir (see below under Utrillo's Paternity). In 1891 a Spanish artist, Miguel Utrillo y Molins, signed a legal document acknowledging paternity, although the question remains as to whether he was in fact the child's father.
Valadon, who became a model after a fall from a trapeze ended her chosen career as a circus acrobat, found that posing for Berthe Morisot, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and others provided her with an opportunity to study their techniques; in some cases, she also became their mistress. She

Melchior d'Hondecoeter (c. 1636 – 3 April 1695), Dutch animalier painter, was born in Utrecht and died in Amsterdam. After the start of his career, he painted virtually exclusively bird subjects, usually exotic or game, in park-like landscapes. Hondecoeter’s paintings featured geese (brent goose, Egyptian brent and red-breasted brent), fieldfares, partridges, pigeons, ducks, magpies and peacocks, but also African grey crowned cranes, Asian sarus cranes, Indonesian Yellow-crested Cockatoos, an Indonesian Purple-naped Lory and Grey-headed Lovebirds from Madagascar.
Being the grandson of painter Gillis d'Hondecoeter and son of Gijsbert d'Hondecoeter, as well as nephew of Jan Baptist Weenix, he was brought up by Weenix in the profession of painting when his father died. Weenix told Arnold Houbraken that in his youth Melchior was extremely religious, praying very loud, so that his mother and uncle doubted if they would have him trained as a painter or a minister.
In 1659 he was working in the Hague and became a member of the painters' academy there. In 1663 Hondecoeter married Susanne Tradel in Amsterdam. She is said to have been captious, and she had her sisters living in their house,

Francisco Manuel Oller y Cestero (June 17, 1833 – May 17, 1917) was a Puerto Rican visual artist. Oller is considered to be the only Latin American painter to have played a role in the development of Impressionism.
Oller was born in Bayamón, Puerto Rico, the third of four children of Cayetano Juan Oller y Fromesta and María del Carmen Cestero Dávila. When he was eleven he began to study art under the tutelage of Juan Cleto Noa, a painter who had an art academy in San Juan, Puerto Rico. There, Oller demonstrated that he had an enormous talent in art and in 1848, General Juan Prim, Governor of Puerto Rico, offered Oller the opportunity to continue his studies in Rome. However, the offer was not accepted as Oller's mother felt that he was too young to travel abroad by himself.
When Oller was eighteen, he moved to Madrid, Spain, where he studied painting at the Royal Academy of San Fernando, under the tutelage of Don Federico de Madrazo y Kuntz, director of the Prado Museum. In 1858, he moved to Paris, France where he studied under Thomas Couture. Later he enrolled to study art in the Louvre under the instruction of Gustave Courbet. During his free time, Oller, who had a baritone type

Jeong Seon (1676–1759) was a well-known Korean landscape painter, also known as by his pen name Gyeomjae (meaning humble study). He was one of the few known Korean painters to depart from traditional Chinese styles. It is reported that he frequently left his studio and painted the world around him, as he could see it. Soon, Jeong Seon inspired other Korean artists to follow suit, leaving a lasting impact on Korean art of the Joseon era.
In contrast to most painters at the time, Jeong Seon was not born in a wealthy family. He was discovered by an aristocratic neighbour who recommended him to the court. Soon he gained an official position.
Jeong is said to have painted daily, with a prolific output until his old age. His paintings are classified as Southern School, but during his life, Jeong developed his own style: unique brush wrinkles of bold strokes in parallels.

Thomas Gainsborough (christened 14 May 1727 – 2 August 1788) was an English portrait and landscape painter. He was born the youngest son of John Gainsborough, a weaver in Suffolk, and, in 1740, left home to study art in London with Hubert Gravelot, Francis Hayman, and William Hogarth. In 1746, he married Margaret Burr, and the couple became the parents of two daughters. He moved to Bath in 1759 where fashionable society patronised him, and he began exhibiting in London. In 1769, he became a founding member of the Royal Academy, but his relationship with the organization was thorny and he sometimes withdrew his work from exhibition. Gainsborough moved to London in 1774, and painted portraits of the King and Queen, but the King was obliged to name as royal painter Gainsborough's rival Joshua Reynolds. In his last years, Gainsborough painted relatively simple landscapes and is credited (with Richard Wilson) as the originator of the 18th century British landscape school. Gainsborough died of cancer in 1788 and is interred at St. Anne's Church, Kew, Surrey. He painted quickly and his later pictures are characterised by a light palette and easy strokes. He preferred landscapes to

Andy Warhol (August 6, 1928 – February 22, 1987) was an American artist who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art. His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity culture and advertisement that flourished by the 1960s. After a successful career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol became a renowned and sometimes controversial artist. The Andy Warhol Museum in his native city, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, holds an extensive permanent collection of art and archives. It is the largest museum in the United States of America dedicated to a single artist.
Warhol's artwork ranged in many forms of media that include hand drawing, painting, printmaking, photography, silk screening, sculpture, film, and music. He was a pioneer in computer-generated art using Amiga computers that were introduced in 1985, just before his death in 1987. He founded Interview Magazine and was the author of numerous books, including The Philosophy of Andy Warhol and Popism: The Warhol Sixties. Andy Warhol is also notable as a gay man who lived openly as such before the gay liberation movement. His studio, The Factory, was a famous gathering place that brought

Pieter Aertsen (1508–3 June 1575), called Lange Pier ("Tall Pete") because of his height, was a Dutch historical painter. He was born and died in Amsterdam, and painted there and in Antwerp, though his genre scenes were influential in Italy.
As a youth, he apprenticed with Allaert Claesz. He distinguished himself by painting domestic scenes in which he reproduced articles of furniture, cooking utensils, and so on, with marvellous fidelity. Later in life, he began documenting historical scenes. Several of his best works, including altarpieces in various churches, were destroyed during the days surrounding the event known as the Alteratie, or "Changeover", when Amsterdam formally reverted to Protestantism from Catholicism on 26 May 1578 at the start of the Eighty Year's War. During the iconoclasm several paintings that had been commissioned by Catholic churches were destroyed.
An excellent specimen of his style is a painting of the Crucifixion, Aertsen was a member of Antwerp's equivalent of the Academy of St Luke. In the official books of the Academy he is known as "Langhe Peter, schilder" (Tall Peter, painter). His sons Pieter, Aert, and Dirck became acclaimed painters, and other

Sebastiano del Piombo (c. 1485 – June 21, 1547), byname of Sebastiano Luciani, was an Italian Renaissance-Mannerist painter of the early 16th century famous for his combination of the colors of the Venetian school and the monumental forms of the Roman school.
Sebastiano del Piombo belongs to the painting school of his native city, Venice, but was active for a large portion of his career in Rome. At first a musician, chiefly a soloist on the lute, he was in great request among the Venetian nobility. He soon showed a turn for painting, and became a pupil of Giovanni Bellini and afterwards of Giorgione, whose influence is apparent in his works. Some of Sebastiano's works were indeed confused with Giorgione's, i.e. the Salomè of 1510.
His first painting of note was done for the church of San Giovanni Crisostomo, Venice, and is so closely modeled on the style of Giorgione that in its author's time it often passed for the work of that master.
It represents Saint John Chrysostom reading aloud at a desk, a grand Magdalene in front, and two other female and three male saints.
Towards 1511-1512, del Piombo aided Baldassarre Peruzzi in mythologic themes for lunettes in the Sala di Galatea in

Cecily Brown, born 1969 in London, is a British painter. She has a great respect for art history and her works reveal her reverence and high regard for artists such as Francisco de Goya, Nicolas Poussin, Willem de Kooning, and Joan Mitchell while incorporating into her works her distinct female view point.
Cecily Brown studied B.Tech Diploma in Art and Design at Epsom School of Art, Surrey, England (1985–1987), drawing and printmaking classes, Morley College, London, 1987–1989, and BA in Fine Arts, Slade School of Art, London (1989–93).
Brown’s work has appeared at the Whitney Biennial 2004 in New York, The Triumph of Painting at the Saatchi Gallery, London and “Greater New York” at P.S. 1, New York. She has exhibited at galleries and museums including Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin, MACRO in Rome and Museum der Moderna, Salzburg. She is represented by Gagosian Gallery.
Cecily Brown’s paintings combine figuration and abstraction. Expanding the tradition of abstract expressionism, she draws her influences from painters such as Willem de Kooning. Her paintings also recall the works of Philip Guston and the Bay Area Figurative School of the 1950s and 1960s. Brown often titles her

Charles Cros (October 1, 1842 – August 9, 1888) was a French poet and inventor. He was born in Fabrezan, Aude, France, 35 km to the East of Carcassonne.
Cros was a well-regarded poet and humorous writer. He developed various improved methods of photography including an early color photo process. He also invented improvements in telegraph technology.
Charles Cros died in Paris.
He is perhaps most famous as the man who almost, but not quite, invented the phonograph. No one before M. Charles Cros had thought of reproducing sound by making an apparatus capable of registering and reproducing sounds which had been engraved with a diaphragm. The inventor gave the name of Paleophone (voix du passé) to his invention. On April 30, 1877 he submitted a sealed envelope containing a letter to the Academy of Sciences in Paris explaining his proposed method. The letter was read in public on the 3rd December following. In his letter, after having shown that his method consisted of detecting an oscillation of a membrane and using the tracing to reproduce the oscillation with respect to its duration and intensity. Cros added that a cylindrical form for the receiving apparatus seemed to him to be the

Frederick Scott Archer (1813–1 May 1857) invented the photographic collodion process which preceded the modern gelatin emulsion. He was born in either Bishop's Stortford or more likely Hertford in the United Kingdom and is remembered mainly for this single achievement which greatly increased the accessibility of photography for the general public.
Scott Archer was the son of a butcher from Hertford who went to London to take an apprenticeship as a silversmith. Later, he became a sculptor and found calotype photography useful as a way of capturing images of his sculptures. Dissatisfied with the poor definition and contrast of the calotype and the long exposures needed, Scott Archer invented the new process in 1848 and published it in The Chemist in March 1851, enabling photographers to combine the fine detail of the daguerreotype with the ability to print multiple paper copies like the calotype. In publishing his discovery, he did so knowingly without first patenting it, giving it as a gift to the world.
He later developed the ambrotype jointly with Peter Fry.
He died impoverished, as since he did not patent the collodion process he made very little money from it. An obituary

Jean-François Millet (October 4, 1814 – January 20, 1875) was a French painter and one of the founders of the Barbizon school in rural France. Millet is noted for his scenes of peasant farmers; he can be categorized as part of the naturalism and realism movements.
Millet was the first child of Jean-Louis-Nicolas and Aimée-Henriette-Adélaïde Henry Millet, members of the peasant community in the village of Gruchy, in Gréville-Hague (Normandy). Under the guidance of two village priests, Millet acquired a knowledge of Latin and modern authors, before being sent to Cherbourg in 1833 to study with a portrait painter named Paul Dumouchel. By 1835 he was studying full-time with Lucien-Théophile Langlois, a pupil of Baron Gros, in Cherbourg. A stipend provided by Langlois and others enabled Millet to move to Paris in 1837, where he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts with Paul Delaroche. In 1839 his scholarship was terminated, and his first submission to the Salon was rejected.
After his first painting, a portrait, was accepted at the Salon of 1840, Millet returned to Cherbourg to begin a career as a portrait painter. However, the following year he married Pauline-Virginie Ono, and they

Julia Margaret Cameron (11 June 1815 – 26 January 1879) was a British photographer. She became known for her portraits of celebrities of the time, and for photographs with Arthurian and other legendary themes.
Cameron's photographic career was short, spanning eleven years of her life (1864–1875). She took up photography at the relatively late age of 48, when she was given a camera as a present. Although her style was not widely appreciated in her own day, her work has had an impact on modern photographers, especially her closely cropped portraits. Her house, Dimbola Lodge, on the Isle of Wight is open to the public.
Julia Margaret Cameron was born Julia Margaret Pattle in Calcutta, India, to James Pattle, a British official of the East India Company, and Adeline de l'Etang, a daughter of French aristocrats. Julia was from a family of celebrated beauties, and was considered an ugly duckling among her sisters. As her great-niece Virginia Woolf wrote in the 1926 introduction to the Hogarth Press collection of Cameron's photographs, "In the trio [of sisters] where...[one] was Beauty; and [one] Dash; Mrs. Cameron was undoubtedly Talent".
Cameron was educated in France, but returned to

Thomas Cowperthwait Eakins (July 25, 1844 – June 25, 1916) was an American realist painter, photographer, sculptor, and fine arts educator. He is widely acknowledged to be one of the most important artists in American art history.
For the length of his professional career, from the early 1870s until his health began to fail some 40 years later, Eakins worked exactingly from life, choosing as his subject the people of his hometown of Philadelphia. He painted several hundred portraits, usually of friends, family members, or prominent people in the arts, sciences, medicine, and clergy. Taken en masse, the portraits offer an overview of the intellectual life of Philadelphia in the late 19th and early 20th centuries; individually, they are incisive depictions of thinking persons. As well, Eakins produced a number of large paintings which brought the portrait out of the drawing room and into the offices, streets, parks, rivers, arenas, and surgical amphitheaters of his city. These active outdoor venues allowed him to paint the subject which most inspired him: the nude or lightly clad figure in motion. In the process he could model the forms of the body in full sunlight, and create images

Georges de La Tour (March 13, 1593 – January 30, 1652) was a French Baroque painter, who spent most of his working life in the Duchy of Lorraine, which was temporarily absorbed into France between 1641 and 1648. He painted mostly religious chiaroscuro scenes lit by candlelight.
Georges de La Tour was born in the town of Vic-sur-Seille in the Diocese of Metz, which was technically part of the Holy Roman Empire, but had been ruled by France since 1552. Baptism documentation reveal that he was the son of Jean de La Tour, a baker, and Sybille de La Tour, née Molian. It has been suggested that Sybille came from a partly noble family. His parents had seven children in all, with Georges being the second-born.
La Tour's educational background remains somewhat unclear, but it is assumed that he travelled either to Italy or the Netherlands early in his career. He may possibly have trained under Jacques Bellange in Nancy, the capital of Lorraine, although their styles are very different. His paintings reflect the Baroque naturalism of Caravaggio, but this probably reached him through the Dutch Caravaggisti of the Utrecht School and other Northern (French and Dutch) contemporaries. In

Sir Peter Paul Rubens (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈrybə(n)s]; 28 June 1577 – 30 May 1640), was a Flemish Baroque painter, and a proponent of an extravagant Baroque style that emphasised movement, colour, and sensuality. He is well known for his Counter-Reformation altarpieces, portraits, landscapes, and history paintings of mythological and allegorical subjects.
In addition to running a large studio in Antwerp that produced paintings popular with nobility and art collectors throughout Europe, Rubens was a classically educated humanist scholar, art collector, and diplomat who was knighted by both Philip IV, King of Spain, and Charles I, King of England.
Rubens was born in Siegen, Germany, to Jan Rubens and Maria Pypelincks. His father, a Calvinist, and mother fled Antwerp for Cologne in 1568, after increased religious turmoil and persecution of Protestants during the rule of the Spanish Netherlands by the Duke of Alba. Jan Rubens became the legal advisor (and lover) of Anna of Saxony, the second wife of William I of Orange, and settled at her court in Siegen in 1570. Following Jan Rubens's imprisonment for the affair, Peter Paul Rubens was born in 1577. The family returned to Cologne the

Jean-Louis André Théodore Géricault (26 September 1791 – 26 January 1824) was a profoundly influential French artist, painter and lithographer, known for The Raft of the Medusa and other paintings. Although he died young, he became one of the pioneers of the Romantic movement.
Born in Rouen, France, Géricault was educated in the tradition of English sporting art by Carle Vernet and classical figure composition by Pierre-Narcisse Guérin, a rigorous classicist who disapproved of his student's impulsive temperament yet recognized his talent. Géricault soon left the classroom, choosing to study at the Louvre instead, where (from 1810 to 1815) he copied from paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, Titian, Diego Velázquez, and Rembrandt. During this period at the Louvre he discovered a vitality he found lacking in the prevailing school of Neoclassicism. Much of his time was spent in Versailles, where he found the stables of the palace open to him, and where he gained his knowledge of the anatomy and action of horses.
His first major work, The Charging Chasseur, exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1812, revealed the influence of the style of Rubens and an interest in the depiction of contemporary

Tiziano Vecelli or Tiziano Vecellio (c. 1488/1490 – 27 August 1576) known in English as Titian ( /ˈtɪʃən/) was an Italian painter, the most important member of the 16th-century Venetian school. He was born in Pieve di Cadore, near Belluno (in Veneto), in the Republic of Venice. During his lifetime he was often called da Cadore, taken from the place of his birth.
Recognized by his contemporaries as "The Sun Amidst Small Stars" (recalling the famous final line of Dante's Paradiso), Titian was one of the most versatile of Italian painters, equally adept with portraits, landscape backgrounds, and mythological and religious subjects. His painting methods, particularly in the application and use of color, would exercise a profound influence not only on painters of the Italian Renaissance, but on future generations of Western art.
During the course of his long life, Titian's artistic manner changed drastically but he retained a lifelong interest in color. Although his mature works may not contain the vivid, luminous tints of his early pieces, their loose brushwork and subtlety of polychromatic modulations are without precedent in the history of Western art.
The exact date of Titian's

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (Italian pronunciation: [karaˈvaddʒo]; 29 September 1571 – 18 July 1610) was an Italian artist active in Rome, Naples, Malta, and Sicily between 1593 and 1610. His paintings, which combine a realistic observation of the human state, both physical and emotional, with a dramatic use of lighting, had a formative influence on the Baroque school of painting.
Caravaggio trained as a painter in Milan under Simone Peterzano who had himself trained under Titian. In his early twenties Caravaggio moved to Rome where, during the late 16th and early 17th centuries, many huge new churches and palazzi were being built and paintings were needed to fill them. During the Counter-Reformation, the Roman Catholic Church searched for religious art with which to counter the threat of Protestantism, and for this task the artificial conventions of Mannerism, which had ruled art for almost a century, no longer seemed adequate.
Caravaggio's novelty was a radical naturalism that combined close physical observation with a dramatic, even theatrical, use of chiaroscuro. This came to be known as Tenebrism, the shift from light to dark with little intermediate value. He burst upon

Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze (May 24, 1816 – July 18, 1868) was a German American history painter best known for his painting Washington Crossing the Delaware. He is associated with the Düsseldorf school of painting.
Leutze was born in Schwäbisch Gmünd, Württemberg (Germany), and was brought to America as a child. His parents settled first in Fredericksburg, Va, and then at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. His early education was good, though not especially in the direction of art. The first development of his artistic talent occurred while he was attending the sickbed of his father, when he attempted drawing to occupy the long hours of waiting. His father died in 1831. At 14, he was painting portraits for $5 apiece. Through such work, he supported himself after the death of his father. In 1834, he received his first instruction in art in classes of John Rubens Smith, a portrait painter in Philadelphia. He soon became skilled, and promoted a plan for publishing, in Washington, portraits of eminent American statesmen; however, he met with but slight encouragement.
In 1840, one of his paintings attracted attention and procured him several orders, which enabled him to go to the Kunstakademie

Frans Hals the Elder (c. 1582 – 26 August 1666) was a Dutch Golden Age painter. He is notable for his loose painterly brushwork, and helped introduce this lively style of painting into Dutch art. Hals was also instrumental in the evolution of 17th century group portraiture.
Hals was born in 1582 or 1583, in Antwerp as the son of the cloth merchant Franchois Fransz Hals van Mechelen (c.1542-1610) and his second wife Adriaentje van Geertenryck. Like many, Hals' parents fled during the Fall of Antwerp (1584-1585) from the Spanish Netherlands to Haarlem, where he lived for the remainder of his life. Hals studied under another Flemish-émigré, Karel van Mander. His Mannerist influence, however, is not noticeably visible in his work. In 1610, he became a member of the Haarlem Guild of Saint Luke, and he started to earn money as an art restorer for the city council. He worked on their large art collection that Karel van Mander had described in his book The Painting-Book (Middle Dutch: Het Schilder-Boeck), published in 1604. The most notable of these were the works of Geertgen tot Sint Jans, Jan van Scorel and Jan Mostaert, that hung in de St. Jans kerk in Haarlem. The restoration work was

Julian Schnabel (born October 26, 1951) is an American artist and filmmaker. In the 1980s, Schnabel received international media attention for his "plate paintings"—large-scale paintings set on broken ceramic plates.
Schnabel directed Before Night Falls, which became Javier Bardem's breakthrough Academy Award-nominated role, and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which was nominated for four Academy Awards.
He has won a Golden Globe, as well as BAFTA, a César Award, two nominations for the Golden Lion and an Academy Award nomination.
Born in Brooklyn, New York City to Esta Greenberg and Jack Schnabel. Schnabel moved with his family to Brownsville, Texas when still young. It was in Brownsville that he spent most of his formative years and where he took up surfing and resolved to be an artist. He is from a Jewish background and his mother was president in 1948 of the Brooklyn chapter of Hadassah, a religious Women's Zionist Organization in America.
He received his B.F.A. at the University of Houston. After graduating, he sent an application to the independent study program at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. His application included slides of his work sandwiched

Lucian Michael Freud, OM, CH (8 December 1922 – 20 July 2011) was a German-born British painter. Known chiefly for his thickly impastoed portrait and figure paintings, he was widely considered the pre-eminent British artist of his time. His works are noted for their psychological penetration, and for their often discomforting examination of the relationship between artist and model.
Born in Berlin, Freud was the son of a German Jewish mother, Lucie (née Brasch), and an Austrian Jewish father, Ernst L. Freud, an architect. He was a grandson of Sigmund Freud, and elder brother of the late broadcaster, writer and politician Clement Freud (thus uncle of Emma and Matthew Freud) and the younger brother of Stephan Gabriel Freud.
He moved with his family to St John's Wood, London, in 1933 to escape the rise of Nazism. He became a British citizen in 1939, having attended Dartington Hall School in Totnes, Devon, and later Bryanston School, for a year before being expelled due to disruptive behaviour.
Freud briefly studied at the Central School of Art in London, and from 1939 with greater success at Cedric Morris' East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing in Dedham, relocated in 1940 at

Santiago Calatrava Valls (Valencian pronunciation: [santiˈaɣo kalaˈtɾava ˈvaʎs], born 28 July 1951) is a Spanish architect, sculptor and structural engineer whose principal office is in Zürich, Switzerland. Classed now among the elite designers of the world, he has offices in Zürich, Paris, Valencia, and New York City.
Calatrava was born in Benimàmet, an old municipality now integrated as an urban part of Valencia, Spain, where he pursued his undergraduate architecture degree at the Polytechnic University of Valencia along with a post-graduate course in urbanism. During his schooldays, he also undertook independent projects with a group of fellow students, bringing out two books on the vernacular architecture of Valencia and Ibiza. Following graduation in 1975, he enrolled in the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, Switzerland, for graduate work in civil engineering. In 1981, after completing his doctoral thesis, "On the Foldability of Space Frames", he started his architecture and engineering practice.
Calatrava's early career was largely dedicated to bridges and train stations, with designs that elevated the status of civil engineering projects to new heights. His

Gerhard Richter (born 9 February 1932) is a German visual artist. Richter has simultaneously produced abstract and photorealistic painted works, as well as photographs and glass pieces, thus following the examples of Picasso and Jean Arp in undermining the concept of the artist’s obligation to maintain a single cohesive style.
Richter is regarded as the top-selling living artist. In October 2012, Richter's Abstraktes Bild set an auction record price for a painting by a living artist at £21m ($34m).
The son of a schoolteacher, Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden, Saxony, and grew up in Reichenau, Lower Silesia, and in Waltersdorf (Zittauer Gebirge) in the Upper Lusatian countryside. He left school after 10th grade and apprenticed as an advertising and stage-set painter, before studying at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. In 1948 he finished higher professional school in Zittau, and, between 1949 and 1951, successively worked as an apprentice with a sign painter, a photographer and as a painter. In 1950 his application for membership in the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Dresden (Dresden University of Visual Arts, founded in 1764) was rejected as "too bourgeois". He finally began

Giorgione (Italian pronunciation: [dʒorˈdʒone]; born Giorgio Barbarelli da Castelfranco; c. 1477/8 – 1510) was a Venetian painter of the High Renaissance in Venice, whose career was cut off by his death at a little over thirty. Giorgione is known for the elusive poetic quality of his work, though only about six surviving paintings are acknowledged for certain to be his work. The resulting uncertainty about the identity and meaning of his art has made Giorgione one of the most mysterious figures in European painting.
Together with Titian, who was slightly younger, he is the founder of the distinctive Venetian school of Italian Renaissance painting, which achieves much of its effect through colour and mood, and is traditionally contrasted with the reliance on a more linear disegno of Florentine painting.
The little known of Giorgione's life is given in Giorgio Vasari's Vite. The painter came from the small town of Castelfranco Veneto, 40 km inland from Venice. His name sometimes appears as Zorzo. The variant Giorgione (or Zorzon) may be translated "Big George". How early in boyhood he went to Venice we do not know, but stylistic evidence supports the statement of Carlo Ridolfi that

Jan Mostaert, also known by the names Joannes Sinapius and Master Of Oultremont (c. 1475 – 1555/1556) was a Dutch Renaissance painter of portraits and religious subjects, though his most famous creation was the "West Indies Landscape".
According to Karel van Mander, Mostaert was born in Haarlem and had been a pupil of Jacob van Haarlem, the painter that painted the altarpiece of the Carrier's guild there in the St. Bavochurch. He was handsome, eloquent and polite, and claimed to be descended from the Haarlem knights of the Crusade to Damietta. He worked eighteen years as portraitist for Margaret of Austria, Regent of the Netherlands. He died in Antwerp where he had been awarded a pension for life. Mostaert's name first appeared in city records in 1498, the year he married and bought a house in his birthplace. He is also mentioned in Haarlem archives from 1527 to 1554. In 1500 Mostaert was commissioned to paint the shutters for a receptacle housing the relics of Saint Bavo in the Groote Kerk, Haarlem. From this date he began to be listed in the records of the Haarlem Guild of St. Luke, and continued to be frequently listed until 1549. He became deacon of the painters' guild in 1507,

Juan de Flandes (c. 1460 – by 1519) ('John of Flanders') was an Early Netherlandish painter who was active in Spain from 1496 to 1519; his actual name is unknown, although an inscription Juan Astrat on the back of one work suggests a name such as "Jan van der Staat". Jan Sallaert, who became a master in Ghent in 1480, has also been suggested.
He was born around 1460 in Flanders (modern Belgium), and evidently trained there, most likely in Ghent, as his work shows similarities to that of Joos van Wassenhove, Hugo van der Goes and other Ghent artists. He is only documented after he became an artist at the court of Isabella I of Castile in Spain, where he is first mentioned in the accounts in 1496, and described as "court painter" by 1498, continuing in her service until her death in 1504. He mostly painted accomplished portraits of the royal family, but also most of a large group of small (21.3 x 16.7 cm) panels for a polyptych altarpiece for Isabella, now widely dispersed with the largest group of panels in the royal collection in Madrid.
After Isabella's death in 1504 he turned to ecclesiastical work for Spanish churches, in Salamanca in 1505-7, and thereafter based in Palencia,

Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marqués de Dalí de Pubol (May 11, 1904 – January 23, 1989), known as Salvador Dalí (Catalan pronunciation: [səɫβəˈðo ðəˈɫi]), was a prominent Spanish surrealist painter born in Figueres, Spain.
Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. His best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in 1931. Dalí's expansive artistic repertoire included film, sculpture, and photography, in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media.
Dalí attributed his "love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes" to a self-styled "Arab lineage", claiming that his ancestors were descended from the Moors.
Dalí was highly imaginative, and also enjoyed indulging in unusual and grandiose behavior. His eccentric manner and attention-grabbing public actions sometimes drew more attention than his artwork, to the dismay of those who held his work in high esteem, and to the irritation of his critics.
Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i

Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈdjeɣo roˈðriɣeθ de ˈsilba i βeˈlaθkeθ]; baptised June 6, 1599 – August 6, 1660) was a Spanish painter who was the leading artist in the court of King Philip IV. He was an individualistic artist of the contemporary Baroque period, important as a portrait artist. In addition to numerous renditions of scenes of historical and cultural significance, he painted scores of portraits of the Spanish royal family, other notable European figures, and commoners, culminating in the production of his masterpiece Las Meninas (1656).
From the first quarter of the nineteenth century, Velázquez's artwork was a model for the realist and impressionist painters, in particular Édouard Manet. Since that time, more modern artists, including Spain's Pablo Picasso and Salvador Dalí, as well as the Anglo-Irish painter Francis Bacon, have paid tribute to Velázquez by recreating several of his most famous works.
Born in Seville, Andalusia, Spain, Diego, the first child of João Rodrigues da Silva and Jerónima Velázquez, was baptized at the church of St Peter in Seville on Sunday, June 6, 1599. This christening must have followed the baby's birth by

François Clouet (c. 1510 – 22 December 1572), son of Jean Clouet, was a French Renaissance miniaturist and painter, particularly known for his detailed portraits of the French ruling family.
Clouet was born in Tours.
The earliest reference to him is a document dated December 1541 (see Jean Clouet), in which the king renounces for the benefit of François his father's estate, which had escheated to the crown as the estate of a foreigner. In this document, the younger Clouet is said to have followed his father very closely in his art. Like his father, he held the office of groom of the chamber and painter in ordinary to the king, and so far as salary is concerned, he started where his father left off. Many drawings are attributed to this artist, often without perfect certainty. There is, however, more to go upon than there is in the case of his father.
As the praises of François Clouet were sung by the writers of the day, his name was carefully preserved from reign to reign, and there is an ancient and unbroken tradition in the attribution of many of his pictures. There are not, however, any original attestations of his works, nor are any documents known which would guarantee the

James Sidney Edouard, Baron Ensor (13 April 1860 – 19 November 1949) was a Flemish-Belgian painter and printmaker, an important influence on expressionism and surrealism who lived in Ostend for almost his entire life. He was associated with the artistic group Les XX.
Ensor's father, James Frederic Ensor, born in Brussels of English parents, was a cultivated man who studied engineering in England and Germany. Ensor's mother, Maria Catherina Haegheman, was Belgian. Ensor himself lacked interest in academic study and left school at the age of fifteen to begin his artistic training with two local painters. From 1877 to 1880, he attended the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, where one of his fellow students was Fernand Khnopff. Ensor first exhibited his work in 1881. From 1880 until 1917, he had his studio in the attic of his parents' house. His only travels were three brief trips to Paris, London, and Holland.
During the late 19th century much of his work was rejected as scandalous, particularly his painting Entry of Christ into Brussels (1888–89), but his paintings continued to be exhibited, and he gradually won acceptance and acclaim. In 1895 his painting The Lamp Boy

Jean-François Raffaëlli (April 20, 1850 – February 11, 1924) was a French realist painter, sculptor, and printmaker who exhibited with the Impressionists. He was also active as an actor and writer.
He was born in Paris, and showed an interest in music and theatre before becoming a painter in 1870. One of his landscape paintings was accepted for exhibition at the Salon in that same year. In October 1871 he began three months of study under Jean-Léon Gérôme at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris; he had no other formal training.
Raffaëlli produced primarily costume pictures until 1876, when he began to depict the people of his time—particularly peasants, workers, and rag pickers seen in the suburbs of Paris—in a realistic style. His new work was championed by influential critics such as J.-K. Huysmans, as well as by Edgar Degas.
The rag-picker became for Raffaëlli a symbol of the alienation of the individual in modern society. Art historian Barbara S. Fields has written of Raffaëlli's interest in the positivist philosophy of Hippolyte-Adolphe Taine, which:
led him to articulate a theory of realism that he christened caractérisme. He hoped to set himself apart from those unthinking,

Luis de Morales (1512 - 9 May 1586) was a Spanish painter born in Badajoz, Extremadura. Known as "El Divino", most of his work was of religious subjects, including many representations of the Madonna and Child and the Passion.
Influenced, especially in his early work, by Raphael Sanzio and the Lombard school of Leonardo, he was called by his contemporaries "The Divine Morales", because of his skill and the shocking realism of his paintings, and because of the spirituality transmitted by all his work.
His work has been divided by critics into two periods, an early stage under the influence of Florentine artists such as Michelangelo and a more intense, more anatomically correct later period similar to German

Robert Cornelius (1809–1893) was an American pioneer of photography.
Born to a Dutch immigrant, Robert Cornelius attended private school as a youth, taking a particular interest in chemistry. In 1831, he began working for his father specializing in silver plating and metal polishing. He became so well renowned for his work, that shortly after, Cornelius was approached by Joseph Saxton to create a silver plate for his daguerreotype of Central High School in Philadelphia. It was this meeting that sparked Cornelius' interest in photography.
With his own knowledge of chemistry and metallurgy, as well as the help of chemist Paul Beck Goddard, Cornelius attempted to perfect the daguerreotype. Around October 1839, Cornelius took a portrait of himself outside of the family store. The daguerreotype produced shows an off center portrait of a man with crossed arms and tousled hair. This self-portrait of Robert Cornelius is one of the first photographs of a human to be produced.
Cornelius would operate two of the earliest photographic studios in the U.S. between 1841 and 1843, but as the popularity of photography grew and more photographers opened studios, Cornelius either lost interest or

Theodore Robinson (July 3, 1852 – April 2, 1896) was an American painter best known for his impressionist landscapes. He was one of the first American artists to take up impressionism in the late 1880s, visiting Giverny and developing a close friendship with Claude Monet. Several of his works are considered masterpieces of American Impressionism.
Robinson was born in Irasburg, Vermont. His family moved to Evansville, Wisconsin, and Robinson briefly studied art in Chicago. In 1874 he journeyed to New York City to attended classes at the National Academy of Design and the Art Students League. In 1876 he traveled to Paris to study under Carolus-Duran and at the École des Beaux-Arts, with Jean-Léon Gérôme. He first exhibited his paintings at the 1877 Salon in Paris, and spent the summer of that year at Grez-sur-Loing. After trips to Venice and Bologna, he returned to the United States in 1879 for several years. During this time Robinson painted in a realist manner, loosely brushed but not yet impressionistic, often depicting people engaged in quiet domestic or agrarian pursuits.
In 1884 Robinson returned to France where he would live for the next eight years, visiting America only

Vincent Willem van Gogh (Dutch: [vɑŋ ˈɣɔχ] ( listen); 30 March 1853 – 29 July 1890) was a Dutch post-Impressionist painter whose work, notable for its rough beauty, emotional honesty and bold color, had a far-reaching influence on 20th-century art. After years of painful anxiety and frequent bouts of mental illness, he died at the age of 37 from a gunshot wound, generally accepted to be self-inflicted (although no gun was ever found). His work was then known to only a handful of people and appreciated by fewer still.
Van Gogh began to draw as a child, and he continued to draw throughout the years that led up to his decision to become an artist. He did not begin painting until his late twenties, completing many of his best-known works during the last two years of his life. In just over a decade, he produced more than 2,100 artworks, consisting of 860 oil paintings and more than 1,300 watercolors, drawings, sketches and prints. His work included self portraits, landscapes, still lifes of flowers, portraits and paintings of cypresses, wheat fields and sunflowers.
Van Gogh spent his early adulthood working for a firm of art dealers, traveling between The Hague, London and Paris, after

Andrea Mantegna (Italian pronunciation: [anˈdrɛa manˈteɲɲa]; c. 1431 – September 13, 1506) was an Italian painter, a student of Roman archeology, and son in law of Jacopo Bellini. Like other artists of the time, Mantegna experimented with perspective, e.g., by lowering the horizon in order to create a sense of greater monumentality. His flinty, metallic landscapes and somewhat stony figures give evidence of a fundamentally sculptural approach to painting. He also led a workshop that was the leading producer of prints in Venice before 1500.
Mantegna was born in Isola di Carturo, close to Padua (then part of the Republic of Venice), second son of a carpenter, Biagio. At the age of eleven he became the apprentice of Francesco Squarcione, Paduan painter. Squarcione, whose original vocation was tailoring, appears to have had a remarkable enthusiasm for ancient art, and a faculty for acting. Like his famous compatriot Petrarca, Squarcione was something of a fanatic for ancient Rome: he travelled in Italy, and perhaps Greece, amassing antique statues, reliefs, vases, etc., forming a collection of such works, then making drawings from them himself, and throwing open his stores for others

Cecco del Caravaggio (active c.1610-mid 1620s), is the name used for a Baroque artist working in Rome in the early decades of the 17th century, an important early follower of Caravaggio. He has been identified as Francesco Boneri (or Buoneri), although this is not universally accepted.
Little is known about Cecco del Caravaggio. In his guide to contemporary artists written for fellow-collectors in about 1620, Considerazioni sulla Pittura, Giulio Mancini mentions a 'Francesco detto Cecco del Caravaggio' as one of the great master's more noteworthy followers. A 'Cecco' is recorded among French artists working with Agostino Tassi at Bagnaia in 1613-15, and hence the artist has been thought to be of French origin, while other scholars have detected a Spanish influence, but in 2001 the scholar Gianni Papi identified this Cecco del Caravaggio as the Lombard artist Francesco Boneri (or Buoneri), and this now seems to be generally although not universally accepted.
None of Cecco's works are signed or dated and hence his oeuvre is difficult to identify, but he is associated with a number of genre pieces, portraits and religious works showing a clear debt to Caravaggio. His more important

Duccio di Buoninsegna (c. 1255-1260 – c. 1318-1319) was born in the city of Siena, Tuscany in Central Italy. Much about his early life and family is uncertain; but we do have records that say he was married with seven children. Although there is a lot still unconfirmed about Duccio di Buoninsegna and his life, documentation of him is much more prevalent than compared to other Italian painters of his time and earlier. Fortunately due to unrelenting research from art historians and archeologists around the world we have been able to uncover some concrete information about this famous Sienese painter. A large part his life must be reconstructed from the evidence of works that can be attributed to him with certainty, and from the evidence contained in his stylistic development. We do know from confirmed documents; that he often found himself in situations with the government. Many time he had debts and fines; historians believe that he had a difficult time managing his life and his money. His artistic talents were enough to overshadow his lack of organization as a citizen, and he became famous in his own lifetime. In the 1300s Duccio became one of the most favored and radical painters

Henri Cartier-Bresson (August 22, 1908 – August 3, 2004) was a French photographer considered to be the father of modern photojournalism. He was an early adopter of 35 mm format, and the master of candid photography. He helped develop the "street photography" or "life reportage" style that has influenced generations of photographers who followed.
Cartier-Bresson was born in Chanteloup-en-Brie, Seine-et-Marne, France, the oldest of five children. His father was a wealthy textile manufacturer, whose Cartier-Bresson thread was a staple of French sewing kits. His mother's family were cotton merchants and landowners from Normandy, where he spent part of his childhood. The Cartier-Bresson family lived in a bourgeois neighborhood in Paris, near Le Pont de l Europe (the Europe Bridge), the point where six major avenues crossed, leading out in all directions: the Rue de Berne, the Rue de St. Petersbourg, the Rue de Constantinople, the Rue de Madrid, the Rue de Vienne (Vienna), the Rue de Londres (London), and the Rue de Berlin. His parents were able to provide him with financial support to develop his interests in photography in a more independent manner than many of his contemporaries.

Eugène Boudin (12 July 1824 – 8 August 1898) was one of the first French landscape painters to paint outdoors. Boudin was a marine painter, and expert in the rendering of all that goes upon the sea and along its shores. His pastels, summary and economic, garnered the splendid eulogy of Baudelaire, and Corot who, gazing at his pictures, said to him, "You are the master of the sky."
Born at Honfleur, France, he worked in a small art shop where Claude Monet displayed his art work Le Havre and Honfleur across the estuary of the Seine. But before old age came on him, Boudin's father abandoned seafaring, and his son gave it up too, having no real vocation for it, though he preserved to his last days much of a sailor's character, frankness, accessibility, and open-heartedness.
In 1835, his family moved to Le Havre, where his father established himself as stationer and frame-maker. He began work the next year as an assistant in a stationery and framing store before opening his own small shop. There he came into contact with artists working in the area and exhibited in his shop the paintings of Constant Troyon and Jean-François Millet, who, along with Jean-Baptiste Isabey and Thomas Couture

Francisco José de Goya y Lucientes (Spanish pronunciation: [fɾanˈθisko xoˈse ðe ˈɣoʝa i luˈθjentes]; 30 March 1746–16 April 1828) was an Aragonese romantic painter and printmaker regarded both as the last of the Old Masters and the first of the moderns. Goya was a court painter to the Spanish Crown, and through his works was both a commentator on and chronicler of his era. The subversive imaginative element in his art, as well as his bold handling of paint, provided a model for the work of later generations of artists, notably Manet, Picasso and Francis Bacon. In his honour, Spain's main national film awards are called the Goya Awards.
Goya was born in Fuendetodos, Aragón, Spain, in 1746 to José Benito de Goya y Franque and Gracia de Lucientes y Salvador. He spent his childhood in Fuendetodos, where his family lived in a house bearing the family crest of his mother. His father earned his living as a gilder. About 1749, the family bought a house in the city of Zaragoza and some years later moved into it. Goya may have attended school at Escuelas Pias. He formed a close friendship with Martin Zapater at this time, and their correspondence from the 1770s to the 1790s is a valuable

Giovanni Francesco Barbieri (February 8, 1591 – December 22, 1666), best known as Guercino or Il Guercino [gwerˈtʃino], was an Italian Baroque painter and draftsman from the region of Emilia, and active in Rome and Bologna. The vigorous naturalism of his early manner is in contrast to the classical equilibrium of his later works. His many drawings are noted for their luminosity and lively style.
He was born in Cento, a village between Bologna and Ferrara. At an early age he acquired the nickname Guercino (Italian for 'squinter') because he was cross-eyed. Mainly self-taught, at the age of 16, he worked as apprentice in the shop of Benedetto Gennari, a painter of the Bolognese School. By 1615, he moved to Bologna, where his work was praised by Ludovico Carracci. Guercino painted two large canvases, Elijah Fed by Ravens and Samson Seized by Philistines, for Cardinal Serra, a Papal Legate to Ferrara. These paintings have a stark naturalist Caravaggesque style, although it is unlikely that Guercino saw any of the Roman Caravaggios first-hand.
The Arcadian Shepherds (Et in Arcadia ego) was painted in 1618 at the same time of The Flaying of Marsyas by Apollo in Palazzo Pitti. Its

Joseph Mallord William Turner RA (23 April 1775 – 19 December 1851) was an English Romantic landscape painter, water-colourist, and printmaker. Turner was considered a controversial figure in his day, but is now regarded as the artist who elevated landscape painting to an eminence rivaling history painting. Although renowned for his oil paintings, Turner is also one of the greatest masters of British watercolour landscape painting. He is commonly known as "the painter of light" and his work is regarded as a Romantic preface to Impressionism.
Joseph Mallord William Turner was born on or around the 23 April 1775 in Maiden Lane, Covent Garden, London, England. His father, William Turner (1738–7 August 1829), was a barber and wig maker, His mother, Mary Marshall, came from a family of butchers. A younger sister, Mary Ann Turner, was born in September 1778 but died aged four in August 1783.
In 1785, as a result of a "fit of illness" in the family the young Turner was sent to stay with his maternal uncle, Joseph Mallord William Marshall, in Brentford, which was then a small town west of London on the banks of the River Thames. From this period, the earliest known artistic exercise by

Piero della Francesca (c. 1415 – October 12, 1492) was a painter of the Early Renaissance. As testified by Giorgio Vasari in his Lives of the Artists, to contemporaries he was also known as a mathematician and geometer. Nowadays Piero della Francesca is chiefly appreciated for his art. His painting was characterized by its serene humanism, its use of geometric forms and perspective. His most famous work is the cycle of frescoes "The Legend of the True Cross" in the church of San Francesco in the Tuscan town of Arezzo.
Piero was born in the town of Borgo Santo Sepolcro, modern-day Tuscany (where he also died), to Benedetto de' Franceschi, a tradesman, and Romana di Perino da Monterchi, part of the Florentine and Tuscan Franceschi noble family.
He was most probably apprenticed to the local painter Antonio di Giovanni d'Anghiari, because in documents about payments is noted that he was working with Antonio in 1432 and May 1438. Besides he certainly took notice of the work of some of the Sienese artists active in San Sepolcro during his youth; e.g. Sassetta. In 1439 Piero received, together with Domenico Veneziano, payments for his work on frescoes for the church of Sant'Egidio in

Rosanna Lauren Arquette (born August 10, 1959) is an American actress, film director, and producer.
Arquette was born in New York City, the daughter of Brenda Olivia "Mardi" (née Nowak), an actress, poet, theater operator, activist, acting teacher, and therapist, and Lewis Arquette, an actor and director. Her paternal grandfather was comedian Cliff Arquette. Her mother was Jewish, the daughter of a Holocaust refugee from Poland. Her father was a convert to Islam from Catholicism, and was related to explorer Meriwether Lewis. Her siblings Patricia, Alexis, Richmond, and David Arquette are also actors.
In 1963, Arquette and her family moved to Chicago, where her father managed The Second City theater for several years. When she was eleven years old, her parents moved to a commune in Front Royal, Virginia. Arquette did not do well at school. In 1974, she hitchhiked across the country with three older teenagers, eventually going to San Francisco, where she worked at renaissance and Dickens fairs. Her professional theater debut was May 27, 1977, appearing in the Story Theatre Musical production of Ovid's The Metamorphoses at the Callboard Theatre on Melrose Place in Los

Wassily Wassilyevich Kandinsky /kænˈdɪnski/ (Russian: Васи́лий Васи́льевич Канди́нский, Vasiliy Vasil’yevich Kandinskiy, Russian pronunciation: [vaˈsʲilʲɪj kɐnˈdʲinskʲɪj]; 16 December [O.S. 4 December] 1866 – 13 December 1944) was an influential Russian painter and art theorist. He is credited with painting the first purely abstract works. Born in Moscow, Kandinsky spent his childhood in Odessa. He enrolled at the University of Moscow, studying law and economics. Successful in his profession—he was offered a professorship (chair of Roman Law) at the University of Dorpat—he began painting studies (life-drawing, sketching and anatomy) at the age of 30.
In 1896 Kandinsky settled in Munich, studying first at Anton Ažbe's private school and then at the Academy of Fine Arts. He returned to Moscow in 1914, after the outbreak of World War I. Kandinsky was unsympathetic to the official theories on art in Moscow, and returned to Germany in 1921. There, he taught at the Bauhaus school of art and architecture from 1922 until the Nazis closed it in 1933. He then moved to France where he lived the rest of his life, became a French citizen in 1939, and produced some of his most prominent art. He

Archibald MacNeal Willard (August 22, 1836–October 11, 1918) was an American painter who was born and raised in Bedford, Ohio.
Willard joined the 86th Ohio Infantry in 1863 and fought in the American Civil War. During this time, he painted several scenes from the war and forged a friendship with photographer James F. Ryder. Willard painted The Spirit of '76 in Wellington, Ohio after he saw a parade pass through the town square. Willard also painted three murals in the main hall of the Fayette County courthouse in Washington Court House, Ohio: The Spirit of Electricity, The Spirit of Telegraphy, and The Spirit of the Mail.
Willard is buried in Wellington, Ohio at the Greenwood Cemetery. There is a Willard Drive in Bedford and a Willard Avenue in nearby Garfield Heights named after him.
Willard's most famous work is The Spirit of '76 (previously known as Yankee Doodle), which was exhibited at the Centennial Exposition. The original is displayed in Abbot Hall, Massachusetts, with several later variations painted by Willard exhibited around the country (including in the United States Department of State). Of note, he used his father as the model for the middle character of the

Henri-Émile-Benoît Matisse (French pronunciation: [ɑ̃ʁi matis]; 31 December 1869 – 3 November 1954) was a French artist, known for his use of colour and his fluid and original draughtsmanship. He was a draughtsman, printmaker, and sculptor, but is known primarily as a painter. Matisse is commonly regarded, along with Picasso and Marcel Duchamp, as one of the three artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture. Although he was initially labelled a Fauve (wild beast), by the 1920s he was increasingly hailed as an upholder of the classical tradition in French painting. His mastery of the expressive language of colour and drawing, displayed in a body of work spanning over a half-century, won him recognition as a leading figure in modern art.
Matisse was born in Le Cateau-Cambrésis, Nord, France, the oldest son of a prosperous grain merchant. He grew up in Bohain-en-Vermandois, Picardie, France. In 1887 he went to Paris to study law, working as a court administrator in Le Cateau-Cambrésis after gaining his qualification. He first started to

Sir Henry Raeburn FRSE RSA (4 March 1756 – 8 July 1823) was a Scottish portrait painter and Scotland's first significant portrait painter since the Union to remain based in Scotland. He served as Portrait Painter to His Majesty in Scotland.
Raeburn was born the son of a manufacturer in Stockbridge, a former village now within the city of Edinburgh. Orphaned, he was supported by his older brother and placed in Heriot's Hospital, where he received an education. At the age of fifteen he was apprenticed to a goldsmith, and various pieces of jewellery, mourning rings and the like, adorned with minute drawings on ivory by his hand, still exist. Soon he took to the production of carefully finished portrait miniatures; meeting with success and patronage, he extended his practice to oil painting, at which he was self-taught. The goldsmith watched the progress of his pupil with interest, and introduced him to David Martin, who had been the favourite assistant of Allan Ramsay the Latter, and was now the leading portrait painter in Edinburgh. Raeburn was especially aided by the loan of portraits to copy. Soon he had gained sufficient skill to make him decide to devote himself exclusively to

John Anthony Baldessari (born June 17, 1931) is an American conceptual artist known for his work featuring found photography and appropriated images. He lives and works in Santa Monica and Venice, California
Initially a painter, Baldessari began to incorporate texts and photography into his canvases in the mid 1960s. In 1970 he began working in printmaking, film, video, installation, sculpture and photography. He has created thousands of works that demonstrate—and, in many cases, combine—the narrative potential of images and the associative power of language within the boundaries of the work of art. His art has been featured in more than 200 solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe. His work influenced Cindy Sherman, David Salle, and Barbara Kruger among others.
Baldessari was born in National City, California. In 1959, Baldessari began teaching art in the San Diego school system. He kept teaching for nearly three decades, in schools and junior colleges and community colleges, and eventually at the university level. When the University of California decided to open up a campus in San Diego, the new head of the Visual Art Department, Paul Brach, asked Baldessari to be part of the

Petrus Christus (ca. 1410/1420–1475/1476) was an Early Netherlandish painter active in Bruges from 1444.
Christus was born in Baarle, near Antwerp and Breda. Long considered a student of and successor to Jan van Eyck, his paintings have sometimes been confused with those of Van Eyck. At the death of Van Eyck in 1441, it was reasoned, Christus took over his master's workshop. In fact, Christus purchased his Bruges citizenship in 1444, three years after Van Eyck's death. Had he been an active pupil in Van Eyck's Bruges workshop in 1441, he would have received his citizenship automatically after the customary period of one year and one day. In other words, Christus may be Van Eyck's successor in the Bruges school, but he was by no means his pupil. In fact, recent research reveals that Christus, long seen only in his great predecessor's light, was an independent painter whose work shows just as much influence from, among others, Dirk Bouts, Robert Campin and Rogier van der Weyden.
It is unknown whether Christus visited Italy, and brought style and technical accomplishments of the greatest Northern European painters directly to Antonello da Messina and other Italian artists, or whether

Ştefan Dimitrescu (January 18, 1886 – May 22, 1933) was a Romanian Post-impressionist painter and draftsman.
Born in Huşi into a modest family, he completed his primary and secondary studies in his hometown. In 1902, deciding to follow his passion for music, he left for Iaşi, where he took cello classes at the Iaşi Conservatory.
In summer of 1903, Dimitrescu entered the National School of Fine Arts in the city, studying in the same class as Nicolae Tonitza; the two studied under Gheorghe Popovici and Emanoil Bardasare. After graduation, Dimitrescu painted murals for the Orthodox churches in Agăş and Asău (Bacău County). Between 1912 and 1913, he studied in Paris, at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, during which time he was attracted to Impressionism.
Drafted into the Romanian Army at the start of the Romanian Campaign of World War I, Dimitrescu was profoundly touched by the experience, and began painting tragic pieces that documented the misery brought by the conflict. Like his friend Tonitza, he began exploring social themes, such as queuing and the effects of bombardments.
In 1917, along with the painters Camil Ressu, Iosif Iser, Marius Bunescu and the sculptors Dimitrie

James Abbott McNeill Whistler (July 11, 1834 – July 17, 1903) was an American-born, British-based artist. Averse to sentimentality and moral allusion in painting, he was a leading proponent of the credo, "art for art's sake". His famous signature for his paintings was in the shape of a stylized butterfly possessing a long stinger for a tail. The symbol was apt, for it combined both aspects of his personality—his art was characterized by a subtle delicacy, while his public persona was combative. Finding a parallel between painting and music, Whistler entitled many of his paintings "arrangements", "harmonies", and "nocturnes", emphasizing the primacy of tonal harmony. His most famous painting is Whistler's Mother (1871), the revered and oft parodied portrait of motherhood. Whistler influenced the art world and the broader culture of his time with his artistic theories and his friendships with leading artists and writers.
James Abbott Whistler was born in Lowell, Massachusetts. He was the first child born to Anna Matilda McNeill and George Washington Whistler, a prominent engineer. She was his father's second wife. At the Ruskin trial (see below), Whistler claimed the more exotic St.

Jean Désiré Gustave Courbet (French pronunciation: [ɡystav kuʁbɛ]; 10 June 1819 – 31 December 1877) was a French painter who led the Realist movement in 19th-century French painting. The Realist movement bridged the Romantic movement (characterized by the paintings of Théodore Géricault and Eugène Delacroix) with the Barbizon School and the Impressionists. Courbet occupies an important place in 19th century French painting as an innovator and as an artist willing to make bold social commentary in his work.
Courbet painted figurative compositions, landscapes, seascapes, and still-lifes. He courted controversy by addressing social issues in his work, and by painting subjects that were considered vulgar, such as the rural bourgeoisie, peasants, and working conditions of the poor. His work belonged neither to the predominant Romantic nor Neoclassical schools. History painting, which the Paris Salon esteemed as a painter's highest calling, did not interest Courbet, who stated that "the artists of one century [are] basically incapable of reproducing the aspect of a past or future century ..." Instead, he believed that the only possible source for a living art is the artist's own

Alfred Sisley (French: [al.fʁɛd sis.lɛ]) (30 October 1839 – 29 January 1899) was an Impressionist landscape painter who was born and spent most of his life in France, but retained British citizenship. He was the most consistent of the Impressionists in his dedication to painting landscape en plein air (i.e., outdoors). He never deviated into figure painting and, unlike Renoir and Pissarro, never found that Impressionism did not fulfill his artistic needs.
Among his important works are a series of paintings of the River Thames, mostly around Hampton, executed in 1874, and landscapes depicting places in or near Moret-sur-Loing.
Sisley was born on 30 October 1839 in Paris to affluent British parents. His father, William Sisley, was in the silk business, and his mother Felicia Sell was a cultivated music connoisseur.
In 1857 at the age of 18, Sisley was sent to London to study for a career in business, but he abandoned it after four years and returned to Paris in 1861. From 1862, he studied at the Paris École des Beaux-Arts within the atelier of Swiss artist Marc-Charles-Gabriel Gleyre, where he became acquainted with Frédéric Bazille, Claude Monet, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir. Together

Edvard Munch (Norwegian: [ˈɛdvɑʁd ˈmʉŋk]; 12 December 1863 – 23 January 1944) was a Norwegian painter and printmaker whose intensely evocative treatment of psychological themes built upon some of the main tenets of late 19th-century Symbolism and greatly influenced German Expressionism in the early 20th century. One of his most well-known works is The Scream of 1893.
Edvard Munch was born in a rustic farmhouse in the village of Ådalsbruk in Løten, to Christian Munch, the son of a priest. Christian was a doctor and medical officer who married Laura Catherine Bjølstad, a woman half his age, in 1861. Edvard had an elder sister, Johanne Sophie (born 1862), and three younger siblings: Peter Andreas (born 1865), Laura Catherine (born 1867), and Inger Marie (born 1868). Both Sophie and Edvard appear to have inherited their artistic talent from their mother. Edvard Munch was related to painter Jacob Munch (1776–1839) and historian Peter Andreas Munch (1810–1863).
The family moved to Christiania (now Oslo) in 1864 when Christian Munch was appointed medical officer at Akershus Fortress. Edvard's mother died of tuberculosis in 1868, as did Munch's favorite sister Johanne Sophie in 1877. After

Jannis Kounellis was born on March 23, 1936 in Piraeus, Greece. He studied in art college in Athens until 1956 and at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome.
In 1963, the artist introduced found objects in his paintings, among them live animals but also fire, earth, burlap sacks, gold. He replaced the canvas with bed frames, doorways, windows or simply the gallery itself. In 1967, Kounellis joined the Arte Povera movement of Germano Celant. In 1969, he exhibited real horses in the galleria l’Attico. Gradually, Kounellis introduced new materials in his installations (propane torches, smoke, coal, meat, ground coffee, lead, found wooden objects, etc.). The gallery environment was replaced with historical (mostly industrial) sites.
In October 2009, Kounellis exhibited many works and various sections at Tate Modern Gallery in London, UK. On the 5th floor, there was a room dedicated to his work. Jonathan Jones of the Guardian newspaper notes : "dry-stone walling, sacks of grain and rice, and a painting that includes part of the score of St John Passion by JS Bach bring a sense of real life, organic and ancient, into the museum. Like the Kiefer installation, this is another of the Artist

Kris Krug (also known as "kk" and "kk+") is a fashion and editorial photographer based in Vancouver, British Columbia, and founder of photography studio Static Photography. He is also a technologist who speaks internationally on the topics of Creative Commons, open source culture, photography and the Internet.
Krug was the president of an online magazine called Spark-online.com which he founded in October 1998. This was one of the earliest web communities available on the internet.
In March 2004 He started Bryght (a Drupal development company). Bryght was acquired by Raincity Studios, a comprehensive purveyor of services related to the Web and social media, in November 2007. By way of the acquisition, he served as President of Raincity Studios until March 2009.
He is an author, having co-written BitTorrent for Dummies with Susannah Gardner, an author/technologist. The book was published on September 30, 2005.
Krug is the organizer and founder of PhotoCamp, a photography unconference with BarCamp origins. He has organized five unconference events including BarCamp Shanghai,, Barcamp Vancouver, and the past three years of Northern Voice..
Krug is a well known contributor to the

Hermann Max Pechstein (December 31, 1881 – June 29, 1955) was a German expressionist painter and printmaker, and a member of the Die Brücke group.
Max Pechstein was born in Zwickau. His father was a craftsman who worked in a textile mill. Early contact with the art of Vincent Van Gogh stimulated Pechstein's development toward expressionism. After studying art first at the School of Applied Arts and then at the Royal Art Academy in Dresden, Pechstein met Erich Heckel and joined the art group Die Brücke in 1906. He was the only member to have formal art training. Later in Berlin, he helped to found the Neue Sezession and gained recognition for his decorative and colorful paintings that were lent from the ideas of Van Gogh, Matisse, and the Fauves. His paintings eventually became more primitive, incorporating thick black lines and angular figures.
Beginning in 1933, Pechstein was vilified by the Nazis because of his art. 326 of his paintings were removed from German museums. 16 of his works were displayed in the Entartete Kunst (Degenerate Art) exhibition of 1937. During this time, Pechstein went into seclusion in rural Pomerania.
He was a prolific printmaker, producing 421

Winslow Homer (February 24, 1836 – September 29, 1910) was an American landscape painter and printmaker, best known for his marine subjects. He is considered one of the foremost painters in 19th century America and a preeminent figure in American art.
Largely self-taught, Homer began his career working as a commercial illustrator. He subsequently took up oil painting and produced major studio works characterized by the weight and density he exploited from the medium. He also worked extensively in watercolor, creating a fluid and prolific oeuvre, primarily chronicling his working vacations.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1836, Homer was the second of three sons of Charles Savage Homer and Henrietta Benson Homer, both from long lines of New Englanders. His mother was a gifted amateur watercolorist and Homer's first teacher, and she and her son had a close relationship throughout their lives. Homer took on many of her traits, including her quiet, strong-willed, terse, sociable nature; her dry sense of humor; and her artistic talent. Homer had a happy childhood, growing up mostly in then rural Cambridge, Massachusetts. He was an average student, but his art talent was evident in his

George Segal (November 26, 1924 – June 9, 2000) was an American painter and sculptor associated with the Pop Art movement. He was presented with a National Medal of Arts in 1999.
Although Segal started his art career as a painter, his best known works are cast lifesize figures and the tableaux the figures inhabited. In place of traditional casting techniques, Segal pioneered the use of plaster bandages (plaster-impregnated gauze strips designed for making orthopedic casts) as a sculptural medium. In this process, he first wrapped a model with bandages in sections, then removed the hardened forms and put them back together with more plaster to form a hollow shell. These forms were not used as molds; the shell itself became the final sculpture, including the rough texture of the bandages. Initially, Segal kept the sculptures stark white, but a few years later he began painting them, usually in bright monochrome colors. Eventually he started having the final forms cast in bronze, sometimes patinated white to resemble the original plaster.
Segal's figures had minimal color and detail, which gave them a ghostly, melancholic appearance. In larger works, one or more figures were placed in

Gian Lorenzo Bernini (also spelled Gianlorenzo or Giovanni Lorenzo) (Naples, 7 December 1598 – Rome, 28 November 1680) was an Italian artist who worked principally in Rome. He was the leading sculptor of his age and also a prominent architect. In addition he painted, wrote plays, and designed metalwork and stage sets.
A student of Classical sculpture, Bernini possessed the unique ability to capture, in marble, the essence of a narrative moment with a dramatic naturalistic realism which was almost shocking. This ensured that he effectively became the successor of Michelangelo, far outshining other sculptors of his generation, including his rival, Alessandro Algardi. His talent extended beyond the confines of his sculpture to consideration of the setting in which it would be situated; his ability to synthesise sculpture, painting and architecture into a coherent conceptual and visual whole has been termed by the art historian Irving Lavin the "unity of the visual arts." A deeply religious man, working in Counter Reformation Rome, Bernini used light as an important metaphorical device in the perception of his religious settings, often using hidden light sources that could intensify

François Boucher (French pronunciation: [fʁɑ̃swa buʃe]) (29 September 1703 – 30 May 1770) was a French painter, a proponent of Rococo taste, known for his idyllic and voluptuous paintings on classical themes, decorative allegories representing the arts or pastoral occupations, intended as a sort of two-dimensional furniture. He also painted several portraits of his illustrious patroness, Madame de Pompadour.
Born in Paris, the son of a lace designer Nicolas Boucher, François Boucher was perhaps the most celebrated decorative artist of the 18th century, with most of his work reflecting the Rococo style. At the young age of 17, Boucher was apprenticed by his father to François Lemoyne, but after only three months he went to work for the engraver Jean-François Cars. Within three years Boucher had already won the elite Grand Prix de Rome, although he did not take up the consequential opportunity to study in Italy until four years later. On his return from studying in Italy in 1731, he was admitted to the Académie de peinture et de sculpture as a historical painter, and became a faculty member in 1734.
His career accelerated from this point, as he advanced from professor to Rector of

Germain Pilon (c. 1537 – 1590) was a French Renaissance sculptor. His date of birth is often stated as either ca. 1525 or ca. 1535
He was born in Paris. Trained by his father and (perhaps) Pierre Bontemps, Pilon was an expert with marble, bronze, wood and terra cotta; from about 1555 he was providing models for Parisian goldsmiths. He was also skilled at drawing.
His works - with their realism and theatrical emotion - show the influence of the School of Fontainebleau, Michelangelo and Italian Mannerism. Much of Pilon's work was on funerary monuments, especially the Valois Chapel at the Saint Denis Basilica designed by Francesco Primaticcio (never completed). He was the favorite sculptor of queen Catherine de' Medici.
Pilon's most famous works include:

John Atkinson Grimshaw (6 September 1836 – 13 October 1893) was a Victorian-era artist, a "remarkable and imaginative painter" known for his city night-scenes and landscapes.
His early paintings were signed "JAG," "J. A. Grimshaw," or "John Atkinson Grimshaw," though he finally settled on "Atkinson Grimshaw."
John Atkinson Grimshaw was born 6 September 1836 in Leeds. In 1856 he married his cousin Frances Hubbard (1835–1917). In 1861, at the age of 24, to the dismay of his parents, he left his job as a clerk for the Great Northern Railway to become a painter. He first exhibited in 1862, mostly paintings of birds, fruit and blossom, under the patronage of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society. He became successful in the 1870s and rented a second home in Scarborough, which became a favourite subject.
Several of his children, Arthur Grimshaw (1864–1913), Louis H Grimshaw (1870–1944), Wilfred Grimshaw (1871–1937) and Elaine Grimshaw (1877–1970) became painters.
Grimshaw's primary influence was the Pre-Raphaelites. True to the Pre-Raphaelite style, he created landscapes of accurate colour, lighting, vivid detail,and realism. He painted landscapes that typified seasons or a type

Kai Breder Fjell (Norwegian pronunciation: [ˈkaɪ ˈfjɛl], March 2, 1907–January 10, 1989) was a Norwegian painter, printmaker and scenographer.
Fjell was born on a farm in the village Skoger near Drammen, Norway. His father was the farmer and painter Conrad Bendiks Fjeld.
Kai Fjell became a pupil of Carl von Hanno in Oslo in 1926. A year later, he enrolled at the State's School of Art and Design of Oslo, where his main teachers were August Eiebakke and from 1929 Olaf Willums. Fjell married Ingeborg Helene Holt in 1931.
His debut exhibition in Oslo Art Society in 1932 was largely unsuccessful.
Kai Fjell early developed an ornamental expressionism. His pictures are heavily influenced by rural life and traditional Norwegian folk art.
Fjell achieved immediate success with his exhibition at Kunstnernes Hus (The Artists' House) in 1937, where all the exhibited paintings were sold.
Fjell's early paintings are dominated by dark and earthy hues and often has grotesque motifs (titles include The Violent Man, The Self-killer, The Hearse). His later works are significantly brighter, more daring in their use of colour, and tranquil in mood. Throughout his long career, the female figure and

Michelangelo di Lodovico Buonarroti Simoni (6 March 1475 – 18 February 1564), commonly known as Michelangelo (Italian pronunciation: [mikeˈlandʒelo]), was an Italian Renaissance sculptor, painter, architect, poet, and engineer who exerted an unparalleled influence on the development of Western art. Despite making few forays beyond the arts, his versatility in the disciplines he took up was of such a high order that he is often considered a contender for the title of the archetypal Renaissance man, along with fellow Italian Leonardo da Vinci.
Michelangelo was considered the greatest living artist in his lifetime, and ever since then he has been held to be one of the greatest artists of all time. A number of his works in painting, sculpture, and architecture rank among the most famous in existence. His output in every field during his long life was prodigious; when the sheer volume of correspondence, sketches, and reminiscences that survive is also taken into account, he is the best-documented artist of the 16th century. Two of his best-known works, the Pietà and David, were sculpted before he turned thirty. Despite his low opinion of painting, Michelangelo also created two of the

Pablo Ruiz y Picasso, known as Pablo Picasso (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈpaβlo piˈkaso], 25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973), was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist, and stage designer who spent most of his adult life in France. As one of the greatest and most influential artists of the 20th century, he is widely known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore. Among his most famous works are the proto-Cubist Les Demoiselles d'Avignon (1907), and Guernica (1937), a portrayal of the German bombing of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War.
Picasso, Henri Matisse and Marcel Duchamp are commonly regarded as the three artists who most defined the revolutionary developments in the plastic arts in the opening decades of the 20th century, responsible for significant developments in painting, sculpture, printmaking and ceramics.
Picasso demonstrated extraordinary artistic talent in his early years, painting in a realistic manner through his childhood and adolescence. During the first decade of the 20th century, his style changed as he experimented

Tang Yin (Chinese: 唐寅; Pinyin: Táng Yín; Yale: Tong Yan; 1470–1524), better known by his courtesy name Tang Bohu (唐伯虎, though it is usually not the custom to address an individual by both surname and courtesy name), was a Chinese scholar, painter, calligrapher, and poet of the Ming Dynasty period whose life story has become a part of popular lore. Even though he was born during Ming Dynasty, Many of his paintings (especially paintings of people) were illustrated with elements from Pre-Tang to Song Dynasty (12th centuries).
Tang Yin (1470–1523) is one of the most notable painters in Chinese art history. He is one of the painting elite the "Four Masters of Ming Dynasty” (Ming Si Jia), which also includes Shen Zhou (1427–1509), Wen Zhengming (1470–1559) and Qiu Ying (ca. 1495-1552). Tang is also a talented poet. Together with his contemporaries Wen Zhengming (1470–1559), Zhu Yunming (1460–1526), and Xu Zhenqing, known as the “Four Literary Masters of the Wuzhong Region.”
Tang's eccentric lifestyle has prompted storytellers to immortalize him as a trickster character in Chinese folklore. In one such story, he falls in love with a slave girl whom he glimpses on the boat of a high

Alexandre Cabanel (28 September 1823 – 23 January 1889) was a French painter.
Cabanel was born in Montpellier, Hérault. He painted historical, classical and religious subjects in the academic style. He was also well known as a portrait painter. According to Diccionario Enciclopedico Salvat, Cabanel is the best representative of the L'art pompier and Napoleon III's preferred painter.
He entered the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris at the age of seventeen. Cabanel studied with François-Édouard Picot and exhibited at the Paris Salon for the first time in 1844, and won the Prix de Rome scholarship in 1845 at the age of twenty two. Cabanel was elected a member of the Institute in 1863 and appointed professor at the École des Beaux-Arts in the same year.
Cabanel won the Grande Médaille d'Honneur at the Salons of 1865, 1867, and 1878.
He was closely connected to the Paris Salon: "He was elected regularly to the Salon jury and his pupils could be counted by the hundred at the Salons. Through them, Cabanel did more than any other artist of his generation to form the character of belle époque French painting". His refusal together with William-Adolphe Bouguereau to allow the impressionist

Edwin Parker "Cy" Twombly, Jr. ( /saɪ ˈtwɒmbli/; April 25, 1928 – July 5, 2011) was an American artist well known for his large-scale, freely scribbled, calligraphic-style graffiti paintings, on solid fields of mostly gray, tan, or off-white colors. He exhibited his paintings worldwide.
Twombly used the nickname "Cy", after his father (also nicknamed Cy, who was briefly a pitcher in Major League Baseball) and the star baseball pitcher Cy Young. Twombly's paintings blur the line between drawing and painting. Many of his best-known paintings of the late 1960s are reminiscent of a school blackboard on which someone has practiced cursive "e"s. Twombly had at this point discarded painting figurative, representational subject-matter, citing the line or smudge – each mark with its own history – as its proper subject.
Later, many of his paintings and works on paper moved into "romantic symbolism", and their titles can be interpreted visually through shapes and forms and words. Twombly often quoted the poet Stéphane Mallarmé, as well as many classical myths and allegories in his works. Examples of this are his Apollo and The Artist and a series of eight drawings consisting solely of

Jacques-Louis David ( /ʒɒkˈlwi ˈdɒvid/; French: [ʒak lwi david]) (30 August 1748 – 29 December 1825) was an influential French painter in the Neoclassical style, considered to be the preeminent painter of the era. In the 1780s his cerebral brand of history painting marked a change in taste away from Rococo frivolity toward a classical austerity and severity, heightened feeling chiming with the moral climate of the final years of the Ancien Régime.
David later became an active supporter of the French Revolution and friend of Maximilien Robespierre (1758–1794), and was effectively a dictator of the arts under the French Republic. Imprisoned after Robespierre's fall from power, he aligned himself with yet another political regime upon his release, that of Napoleon I. It was at this time that he developed his Empire style, notable for its use of warm Venetian colours. David had a huge number of pupils, making him the strongest influence in French art of the early 19th century, especially academic Salon painting.
Jacques-Louis David was born into a prosperous family in Paris on 30 August 1748. When he was about nine his father was killed in a duel and his mother left him with his

Leonor Fini (August 30, 1907 – January 18, 1996) was an Argentine surrealist painter.
Born in Buenos Aires, Argentina, she was raised in Trieste, Italy. She moved to Milan at the age of 17, and then to Paris, in either 1931 or 1932. There, she became acquainted with, among many others, Paul Éluard, Max Ernst, Georges Bataille, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Picasso, André Pieyre de Mandiargues, and Salvador Dalí. She traveled Europe by car with Mandiargues and Cartier-Bresson where she was photographed nude in a swimming pool by Cartier-Bresson. The photograph of Fini sold in 2007 for $305,000 - the highest price paid at auction for one of his works to that date.
She painted portraits of Jean Genet, Anna Magnani, Jacques Audiberti, Alida Valli, Jean Schlumberger (jewelry designer) and Suzanne Flon as well as many other celebrities and wealthy visitors to Paris. While working for Elsa Schiaparelli she designed the flacon for the perfume, "Shocking", which became the top selling perfume for the House of Schiaparelli. She designed costumes and decorations for theater, ballet and opera, including the first ballet performed by Roland Petit's Ballet de Paris, "Les Demoiselles de la nuit",

Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepi, better known as Sandro Botticelli (Italian pronunciation: [ˈsandro bottiˈtʃɛlli]; c. 1445 – May 17, 1510) was an Italian painter of the Early Renaissance. He belonged to the Florentine school under the patronage of Lorenzo de' Medici, a movement that Giorgio Vasari would characterize less than a hundred years later as a "golden age", a thought, suitably enough, he expressed at the head of his Vita of Botticelli. Botticelli's posthumous reputation suffered until the late 19th century; since then his work has been seen to represent the linear grace of Early Renaissance painting. Among his best known works are The Birth of Venus and Primavera.
There are very few details of Botticelli's life, but it is known that he became an apprentice when he was about fourteen years old, which would indicate that he received a fuller education than other Renaissance artists. He was born in the city of Florence in a house in the Via Nuova, Borg'Ognissanti. Vasari reported that he was initially trained as a goldsmith by his brother Antonio. Probably by 1462 he was apprenticed to Fra Filippo Lippi; many of his early works have been attributed to the elder

Wilhelm Lehmbruck (January 4, 1881 – March 25, 1919) was a German sculptor.
Born in Duisburg, he was the fourth of eight children born to the miner Wilhelm Lehmbruck and his wife Margaretha. He was able to study sculpture arts at the School of Applied Arts in Düsseldorf by a stipend from the municipal authorities. In 1899 he began to make a living by doing illustrations for scientific publications. He trained at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and is associated with the Düsseldorf school of painting from 1901 to 1906. On leaving the academy Lehmbruck worked as an independent artist in Düsseldorf. He exhibited for the first time at the Deutsche Kunstausstellung, in Cologne in 1906. He was impressed by the sculptures of Auguste Rodin, and traveled to England, Italy, the Netherlands, and Paris. In 1907, he married Anita Kaufmann, and they had three sons.
In 1912 Lehmbruck exhibited in the Folkwang Museum in Hagen, with Egon Schiele. In 1914, he had his first solo exhibition in Paris, at the Galerie Levesque. He contributed to an exhibition at the Grand Palais in Paris. From 1910–1914 he lived in Paris. He frequented the Café du Dôme, where he met sculptors such as Modigliani, Brancusi,

William-Adolphe Bouguereau (November 30, 1825 – August 19, 1905) was a French academic painter. William Bouguereau (French: [wiljɑm buɡ(ə)ˈʁo]) was a traditionalist; in his realistic genre paintings he used mythological themes, making modern interpretations of Classical subjects, with an emphasis on the female human body.
William-Adolphe Bouguereau was born in La Rochelle, France on November 30, 1825, into a family of wine and olive oil merchants. He seemed destined to join the family business but for the intervention of his uncle Eugène, a Roman Catholic priest, who taught him classical and Biblical subjects, and arranged for Bouguereau to go to high school. He showed artistic talent early on. His father was convinced by a client to send him to the École des Beaux-Arts in Bordeaux, where he won first prize in figure painting for a depiction of Saint Roch. To earn extra money, he designed labels for jams and preserves.
Through his uncle, Bouguereau was given a commission to paint portraits of parishioners, and when his aunt matched the sum he earned, Bouguereau went to Paris and became a student at the École des Beaux-Arts. To supplement his formal training in drawing, he attended

Pietro Perugino (Italian: [ˈpjɛːtro peruˈdʒiːno]) (c. 1446/1450–1523), born Pietro Vannucci, was an Italian Renaissance painter of the Umbrian school, who developed some of the qualities that found classic expression in the High Renaissance. Raphael was his most famous pupil.
He was born Pietro Vannucci in Città della Pieve, Umbria, the son of Cristoforo Vannucci; his nickname characterizes him as from Perugia, the chief city of Umbria. Despite what stated by his biographer Giorgio Vasari, the Vannucci were one of the richest in the town. His exact date of birth is not known, although, basing on his age at the death mentioned by Vasari and Giovanni Santi, it has been dated between 1446 and 1452.
He most likely began to study painting in Perugia, in local workshops such as those of Bartolomeo Caporali or Fiorenzo di Lorenzo. The date of this first Florentine sojourn is unknown; some make it as early as 1466/1470, others push the date to 1479. According to Vasari, he apprenticed in the workshop of Andrea del Verrocchio alongside Leonardo da Vinci, Domenico Ghirlandaio, Lorenzo di Credi, Filippino Lippi and others. He may have learned perspective from Piero della Francesca. In 1472 he

Armand Guillaumin (French pronunciation: [ɡijomɛ̃]; February 16, 1841 – June 26, 1927), was a French impressionist painter and lithographer.
Born Jean-Baptiste Armand Guillaumin in Paris, he worked at his uncle's lingerie shop while attending evening drawing lessons. He also worked for a French government railway before studying at the Académie Suisse in 1861. There, he met Paul Cézanne and Camille Pissarro with whom he maintained lifelong friendships. While he never achieved the stature of these two, his influence on their work was significant. Cézanne attempted his first etching based on Guillaumin paintings of barges on the River Seine.
Guillaumin exhibited at the Salon des Refusés in 1863. He participated in six of the eight Impressionist exhibitions: 1874, 1877, 1880, 1881, 1882 and 1886. In 1886 he became a friend of Vincent van Gogh whose brother, Theo sold some of his works. He was finally able to quit his government job and concentrate on painting full-time in 1891, when he won 100,000 francs in the state lottery.
Noted for their intense colours, Guillamin's paintings are represented in major museums around the world. He is best remembered for his landscapes of Paris, the

Antoine Joseph Wiertz (22 February 1806 – 18 June 1865) was a Belgian romantic painter and sculptor.
Born in Dinant from a relatively poor family, he entered the Antwerp art academy in 1820. Thanks to his protector Pierre-Joseph de Paul de Maibe, a member of the Second Chamber of the States-General, king William I of the Netherlands awarded an annual stipend to Wiertz from 1821 onwards. Between November 1829 and May 1832, he stayed in Paris, where he studied the old masters at the Louvre.
In 1828, Wiertz took part in the Grand Concours, also known as Concours de Rome, but came out only second. He landed the prestigious Prix de Rome only at his second attempt in 1832, which enabled him to go to Rome, where he resided from May 1834 until February 1837. Upon his return, he established himself in Liège with his mother.
During his stay in Rome, Wiertz worked on his first great work, Les Grecs et les Troyens se disputant le corps de Patrocle ("Greeks and Trojans fighting for the body of Patrocles", finished in 1836), on a subject borrowed from canto XVII of Homer's Iliad. It was exhibited in Antwerp in 1837, where it met with some success. Wiertz submitted the work for the Paris Salon of

Apelles (Ἀπελλῆς) of Kos (flourished 4th century BC) was a renowned painter of ancient Greece. Pliny the Elder, to whom we owe much of our knowledge of this artist (Naturalis Historia 35.36.79–97 and passim), rated him superior to preceding and subsequent artists. He dated Apelles to the 112th Olympiad (332–329 BC), possibly because he had produced a portrait of Alexander the Great.
Probably born at Colophon in Ionia, he first studied under Ephorus of Ephesus, but after he had attained some celebrity he became a student to Pamphilus at Sicyon He thus combined the Dorian thoroughness with the Ionic grace. Attracted to the court of Philip II, he painted him and the young Alexander with such success that he became the recognized court painter of Macedon, and his picture of Alexander holding a thunderbolt ranked in the minds of many with the Alexander with the spear of the sculptor Lysippus. Plutarch was among the unimpressed, deciding that it had failed accurately to reproduce Alexander's colouring: "He made Alexander's complexion appear too dark-skinned and swarthy, whereas we are told that he was fair-skinned, with a ruddy tinge that showed itself especially upon his face and

Eugène Boch (1 September 1855 – 3 January 1941) was a Belgian painter, born in Saint-Waast, Nord, Hainaut, and the younger brother of Anna Boch, a founding member of Les XX.
Born into the 5th generation of the Boch family, a wealthy dynasty of manufacturers of fine china and ceramics, still active today under the firm of Villeroy & Boch, Eugène Boch enrolled in the private atelier of Léon Bonnat in Paris, in 1879. From 1882, when Bonnat closed his atelier, he studied at the atelier of Fernand Cormon. Paintings of his were admitted to the Salon in 1882, 1883 and 1885.
In 1888, he was introduced by Dodge MacKnight to Vincent van Gogh.
In 1892 he settled in Monthyon (Seine-and-Marne), not far from Paris. In 1909, he married Anne-Marie Léonie Crusfond (?-1933), in 1910 they moved to their recently erected chalet "La Grimpette", where both lived until their death.
Like his sister Anna Boch, Eugène supported artists of talent, but without money, including Emile Bernard, whom he met at the Atelier Cormon, and Paul Gauguin. Or he exchanged works, as with van Gogh. Thus little by little, an important collection of contemporary art came together. Besides his own portrait Eugène Boch owned a

Gottfried Lindauer, also known by his Czech name as Bohumír Lindauer (5 January 1839, Plzeň, Western Bohemia, Czech Republic – 13 June 1926 Woodville, New Zealand) was a Czech and later a New Zealand artist famous for his portraits including that of the Māori. Despite his German sounding surname, he was ethnically Czech.
Lindauer was born in the western Czech city of Plzeň (Pilsen), baptised with a traditional Czech name Bohumír. His father Ignatz Lindauer was a gardener. His first drawing experience were plants and trees. From 1855 Lindauer, as many other Czechs of those days, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where he took classes of Leopold Kupelwieser and Josef Führich. To increase his chances on the market, he decided to adopt the German translation of his name "Gottfried". From his studio in Pilsen he created paintings with religious themes for Czech churches. His paintings attracted people, particularly the prominent people who were often the subjects of his paintings.
To avoid being drafted to the Austrian military service he left for Germany and in 1874 boarded a boat to New Zealand. Many prominent Māori chiefs commissioned his work, which accurately records

Henri Julien Félix Rousseau (French pronunciation: [ɑ̃ʁi ʒyljɛ̃ feliks ʁuso]) (May 21, 1844 – September 2, 1910) was a French Post-Impressionist painter in the Naïve or Primitive manner. He was also known as Le Douanier (the customs officer), a humorous description of his occupation as a toll collector. Ridiculed during his life, he came to be recognized as a self-taught genius whose works are of high artistic quality.
Henri Rousseau was born in Laval, France in 1844 in the Loire Valley into the family of a tinsmith; he was forced to work there as a young boy. He attended Laval High School as a day student and then as a boarder, after his father became a debtor and his parents had to leave the town upon the seizure of their house. He was mediocre in some subjects at the high school but won prizes for drawing and music. He worked for a lawyer and studied law, but "attempted a small perjury and sought refuge in the army," serving for four years, starting in 1863. With his father's death, Rousseau moved to Paris in 1868 to support his widowed mother as a government employee. In 1868, he married Clémence Boitard, his landlord's 15 year-old daughter, with whom he had six children (only

Hieronymus Bosch (/ˌhaɪ.əˈrɒnɨməs ˈbɒʃ/; Dutch: [ɦijeːˈɾoːnimʏs ˈbɔs]; born Jheronimus van Aken Dutch pronunciation: [jeɪˈɾoːnimʏs vɑn ˈaːkə(n)]; (c. 1450 – 9 August 1516), was a Dutch painter. His work is known for its use of fantastic imagery to illustrate moral and religious concepts and narratives.
Hieronymus Bosch was born Jheronimus (or Joen, respectively the Latin and Middle Dutch form of the name "Jerome") van Aken (meaning "from Aachen"). He signed a number of his paintings as Jheronimus Bosch (pronounced Jeronimus Bos in Middle Dutch). The name derives from his birthplace, 's-Hertogenbosch, which is commonly called "Den Bosch".
Little is known of Bosch’s life or training. He left behind no letters or diaries, and what has been identified has been taken from brief references to him in the municipal records of 's-Hertogenbosch, and in the account books of the local order of the Brotherhood of Our Lady. Nothing is known of his personality or his thoughts on the meaning of his art. Bosch’s date of birth has not been determined with certainty. It is estimated at c. 1450 on the basis of a hand drawn portrait (which may be a self-portrait) made shortly before his death in 1516.

Johannes, Jan or Johan Vermeer (Dutch pronunciation: [joˈɦɑnəs jɑn vərˈmɪːr];1632 – December 1675) was a Dutch painter who specialized in domestic interior scenes of middle class life. Vermeer was a moderately successful provincial genre painter in his lifetime. He seems never to have been particularly wealthy, leaving his wife and children in debt at his death, perhaps because he produced relatively few paintings.
Vermeer worked slowly and with great care, using bright colours and sometimes expensive pigments, with a preference for cornflower blue and yellow. He is particularly renowned for his masterly treatment and use of light in his work.
Vermeer painted mostly domestic interior scenes. "Almost all his paintings are apparently set in two smallish rooms in his house in Delft; they show the same furniture and decorations in various arrangements and they often portray the same people, mostly women".
Recognized during his lifetime in Delft and The Hague, his modest celebrity gave way to obscurity after his death; he was barely mentioned in Arnold Houbraken's major source book on 17th-century Dutch painting (Grand Theatre of Dutch Painters and Women Artists), and was thus omitted

Joseph Beuys (German pronunciation: [ˈjoːzɛf ˈbɔʏs]; May 12, 1921 – January 23, 1986) was a German Fluxus, Happening and performance artist as well as a sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist and pedagogue of art.
His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his "extended definition of art" and the idea of social sculpture as a gesamtkunstwerk, for which he claimed a creative, participatory role in shaping society and politics. His career was characterized by passionate, even acrimonious public debate, but he is now regarded as one of the most influential artists of the second half of the 20th century.
Joseph Beuys was born in Krefeld, the son of the merchant Josef Jakob Beuys (1888–1958) and Johanna Maria Margarete Beuys (born Hülsermann, 1889–1974). The parents had moved from Geldern to Krefeld in 1910, and Beuys was born there on May 12, 1921. In autumn of that year the family moved to Kleve, an industrial town in the Lower Rhine region of Germany, close to the Dutch border. There, Joseph attended primary school (Katholische Volksschule) and secondary/high- school (Staatliches Gymnasium Cleve,

Rolf (Emil Rudolf) Nesch (January 7, 1893 - October 27, 1975) was an expressionist artist, especially noted for his printmaking. Born in Germany, he moved to Norway following the Nazi takeover in 1933.
Nesch was born in Esslingen am Neckar, and studied at the academy in Dresden from 1912 to 1914. He then participated in World War I, but was taken prisoner by the British. In 1929 he settled in Hamburg to continue his painting career, influenced by expressionism in general, especially Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Edvard Munch.
Upon the Nazi takeover in Germany in 1933, Nesch repatriated to Norway. Inspired by Norwegian scenery and working life, he discarded canvas and paintbrushes for good, and produced the following year his first so-called material picture, and also took up sculpture. Apart from drawing, which was his natural tool and means of expression throughout, it was printmaking he devoted himself to most continuously and over the greatest number of years. And it is as printmaker that Rolf Nesch made his most significant contribution, not merely as a technical innovator who discovered the potential in new materials and methods, but also from the artistic point of view.
Nesch was

Giulio Romano (c. 1499 – 1 November 1546) was an Italian painter and architect. A pupil of Raphael, his stylistic deviations from high Renaissance classicism help define the 16th-century style known as Mannerism. Giulio's drawings have long been treasured by collectors; contemporary prints of them engraved by Marcantonio Raimondi were a significant contribution to the spread of 16th-century Italian style throughout Europe.
Giulio Romano was born in Rome.
In his native city, as a young assistant in Raphael's studio, he worked on the frescos in the Vatican loggias to designs by Raphael and in Raphael's Stanze in the Vatican painted a group of figures in the Fire in the Borgo fresco. He also collaborated on the decoration of the ceiling of the Villa Farnesina. After the death of Raphael in 1520, he helped complete the Vatican frescoes of the life of Constantine as well as Raphael's Coronation of the Virgin and the Transfiguration in the Vatican. In Rome, Giulio decorated the Villa Madama for Cardinal Giuliano de' Medici, afterwards Clement VII. The crowded Giulio Romano frescoes lack the stately and serene simplicity of his master.
After the Sack of Rome in 1527 and the death of Leo

Andrew Newell Wyeth (/ˈwaɪ.ɛθ/WY-eth; July 12, 1917 – January 16, 2009) was a visual artist, primarily a realist painter, working predominantly in a regionalist style. He was one of the best-known U.S. artists of the middle 20th century.
In his art, Wyeth's favorite subjects were the land and people around him, both in his hometown of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and at his summer home in Cushing, Maine. One of the most well-known images in 20th-century American art is his painting, Christina's World, currently in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.
Andrew Wyeth was the youngest of the five children of illustrator and artist N.C. (Newell Convers) Wyeth and his wife, Carolyn Bockius Wyeth. He was born July 12, 1917 on Henry Thoreau's 100th birthday. Due to N.C.'s fond appreciation of Henry Thoreau, he found this both coincidental and exciting. N.C. was an attentive father, fostering each of the children's interests and talents. The family was close, spending time reading together, taking walks, fostering "a closeness with nature" and developing a feeling for Wyeth family history.
Andrew was home-tutored because of his frail health. Like his father, the young

Dorothea Lange (May 26, 1895 – October 11, 1965) was an influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist, best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA). Lange's photographs humanized the consequences of the Great Depression and influenced the development of documentary photography.
Born of second generation German immigrants on May 26, 1895, at 1041 Bloomfield Street, Hoboken, New Jersey, Dorothea Lange was named Dorothea Margaretta Nutzhorn at birth. She dropped her middle name and assumed her mother's maiden name after her father abandoned the family when she was 12 years old, one of two traumatic incidents in her early life. The other was her contraction of polio at age seven which left her with a weakened right leg and a permanent limp. "It formed me, guided me, instructed me, helped me and humiliated me," Lange once said of her altered gait. "I've never gotten over it, and I am aware of the force and power of it."
Lange was educated in photography at Columbia University in New York City, in a class taught by Clarence H. White. She was informally apprenticed to several New York photography studios, including that of the famed

Hendrik Nicolaas Werkman (commonly called H.N. Werkman; 29 April 1882 – 10 April 1945) was a Dutch artist, typographer and printer.
Werkman was born in Leens, in the Dutch province of Groningen. In 1908, he established a printing and publishing house in Groningen that at its peak employed twenty workers. Financial setbacks forced its closure in 1923, after which Werkman started anew with a small workshop in the attic of a warehouse.
Werkman was a member of the artists' group De Ploeg ("The Plough"), for which he printed posters, invitations and catalogues. From 1923 to 1926, he produced his own English-named avant-garde magazine The Next Call, which, like other works of the period, included collage-like experimentation with typefaces, printing blocks and other printers' materials. He also used stenciling and stamping to achieve unique effects. He would distribute the magazine by exchanging it for works by other avant-garde artists and designers throughout Europe.
In May 1940, soon after the German invasion of the Netherlands, Werkman, together with his friend August Henkels and others, began publishing a series of Hassidic stories from the legend of the Baal Shem Tov through their

Herman Wilhelm Bissen (13 October 1798 – 10 March 1868) was a Danish sculptor.
Bissen first studied painting in Copenhagen, then became a pupil of the sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen. In 1824, he travelled to Rome and met Christian Daniel Rauch in Berlin. Under the influence of Thorvaldsen, his style changed from romanticism to neo-classicism. Back in Denmark, Bissen became professor at the Academy of Arts, Copenhagen in 1834, changing in style to realism. Among his works are the monumental Landsoldaten (1858) in Fredericia and the Isted Lion (1862) (originally in Flensburg, over Berlin and Copenhagen and back to Flensburg), the gold-plated statue of Bishop Absalon on the front of the Copenhagen City Hall and many smaller pieces.

Juan de Pareja (1606–1670) was a Spanish painter, born in Antequera, near Málaga, Spain. He is primarily known as a member of the household and workshop of painter Diego Velázquez. His 1661 work The Calling of St. Matthew (sometimes also referred to as The Vocation of St. Matthew) is currently on display at the Museo del Prado in Madrid, Spain. De Pareja became Velazquez's assistant sometime after the master returned to Madrid from his first trip to Italy in January 1631. After the death of Velazquez he entered the service of Juan del Mazo.
He was a slave and afterwards a freedman, and was described as a "Morisco", being "of mixed heritage and a strange color". The usage of the word "morisco" at the time carried two possible meanings. It was used to refer to both descendants of Muslims who remained in Spain after the reconquest, and to refer to the offspring of a Spaniard and a mulatto.

Luo Ping (simplified Chinese: 罗聘; traditional Chinese: 羅聘; pinyin: Luó Pìng; Wade–Giles: Lo P'ing 1733 - 1799) was a Qing dynasty painter who lived in Gan Yuan (甘泉, modern day Yangzhou) of Jiangsu Province. His style name was 'Disappearing Gentleman' (Dùnfu, 遯夫)，and his pseudonyms were 'Two Peaks' (Liǎng Fēng, 兩峰) and 'Monk of the Temple of Flowers' (Huā zhi Sì Sēng, 花之寺僧). He studied painting under Jin Nong and developed a unique personal style. He painted people, Buddhist images, plum with bamboo, flowers, and scenery paintings. He refused government service to live a life of poverty selling paintings. He was the youngest of the Eight Eccentrics of Yangzhou.
Luo Ping's life began with loss and sadness. His father died when Luo was just one year old, and his mother soon after. But from an early age the youth orphan was recognized as a talented poet and gained admission to the exclusive artistic circles of his home town, Yangzhou. At nineteen he married - for love -- the poet and painter Fang Wanyi (方婉儀, 1732 - 1779). Their daughter and two sons (Yǔnshào, 允绍, and Yǔnzuǎn, 允缵) also went on to become artists. All painted plum blossoms, the family trade mark (罗家梅派）.
Five years after

Paul Cézanne (US /seɪˈzæn/ or UK /sɨˈzæn/; French: [pɔl sezan]; 1839–1906) was a French artist and Post-Impressionist painter whose work laid the foundations of the transition from the 19th century conception of artistic endeavour to a new and radically different world of art in the 20th century. Cézanne can be said to form the bridge between late 19th century Impressionism and the early 20th century's new line of artistic enquiry, Cubism. The line attributed to both Matisse and Picasso that Cézanne "is the father of us all" cannot be easily dismissed.
Cézanne's often repetitive, exploratory brushstrokes are highly characteristic and clearly recognizable. He used planes of colour and small brushstrokes that build up to form complex fields. The paintings convey Cézanne's intense study of his subjects.
The Cézannes came from the small town of Cesana now in West Piedmont, and it has been assumed that the surname came from Italian origin. Paul Cézanne was born on 19 January 1839 in Aix-en-Provence, in Provence in the South of France. On 22 February, Paul was baptized in the parish church, with his grandmother and uncle Louis as godparents. His father, Louis-Auguste Cézanne (28 July

Pieter Bruegel (Brueghel) the Elder (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈpitəɾ ˈbɾøːɣəl]; c. 1525 – 9 September 1569) was a Flemish Renaissance painter and printmaker known for his landscapes and peasant scenes (so called genre painting). He is sometimes referred to as the "Peasant Bruegel" to distinguish him from other members of the Brueghel dynasty, but he is also the one generally meant when the context does not make clear which Brueghel is being referred to. From 1559 he dropped the 'h' from his name and signed his paintings as Bruegel.
According to some sources he was born in Breugel near the (now Dutch) town of Breda. There are however also records that he was born in Breda, and there is some uncertainty whether the (now Belgian) town of Bree, called Breda in Latin, is meant. He was an apprentice of Pieter Coecke van Aelst, whose daughter Mayken he later married. He spent some time in France and Italy, and then went to Antwerp, where in 1551 he was accepted as a master in the painter's guild. He traveled to Italy soon after, and then returned to Antwerp before settling in Brussels permanently 10 years later.
He received the nickname 'Peasant Bruegel' or 'Bruegel the Peasant' for his

Tristan Tzara (French pronunciation: [tʁistɑ̃ dzaˈʁa]; Romanian pronunciation: [trisˈtan ˈt͡sara]; born Samuel or Samy Rosenstock, also known as S. Samyro; April 16 [O.S. April 4] 1896 – December 25, 1963) was a Romanian and French avant-garde poet, essayist and performance artist. Also active as a journalist, playwright, literary and art critic, composer and film director, he was known best for being one of the founders and central figures of the anti-establishment Dada movement. Under the influence of Adrian Maniu, the adolescent Tzara became interested in Symbolism and co-founded the magazine Simbolul with Ion Vinea (with whom he also wrote experimental poetry) and painter Marcel Janco. During World War I, after briefly collaborating on Vinea's Chemarea, he joined Janco in Switzerland. There, Tzara's shows at the Cabaret Voltaire and Zunfthaus zur Waag, as well as his poetry and art manifestos, became a main feature of early Dadaism. His work represented Dada's nihilistic side, in contrast with the more moderate approach favored by Hugo Ball.
After moving to Paris in 1919, Tzara, by then one of the "presidents of Dada", joined the staff of Littérature magazine, which marked the

Alexander Calder (July 22, 1898 – November 11, 1976) was an American sculptor best known as the originator of the mobile, a type of kinetic sculpture the delicately balanced or suspended components of which move in response to motor power or air currents; by contrast, Calder’s stationary sculptures are called stabiles. He also produced numerous wire figures, notably for a vast miniature circus.
Alexander "Sandy" Calder was born in Lawnton, Pennsylvania on July 22, 1898. His father, Stirling Calder, was a well-known sculptor who created many public installations, a majority of them in nearby Philadelphia.
Sandy Calder's grandfather, sculptor Alexander Milne Calder, was born in Scotland, immigrated to Philadelphia in 1868, and is best-known for the colossal statue of William Penn on top of Philadelphia City Hall's tower. Sandy Calder's mother, Nanette (née Lederer), was a professional portrait artist, who had studied at the Académie Julian and the Sorbonne in Paris from around 1888 until 1893. She moved to Philadelphia where she met Stirling Calder while studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Sandy Calder's parents married on February 22, 1895; his sister, Mrs.

Antonio Allegri da Correggio (August 1489 – March 5, 1534), usually known as Correggio, was the foremost painter of the Parma school of the Italian Renaissance, who was responsible for some of the most vigorous and sensuous works of the 16th century. In his use of dynamic composition, illusionistic perspective and dramatic foreshortening, Correggio prefigured the Rococo art of the 18th century.
Antonio Allegri was born in Correggio, Italy, a small town near Reggio Emilia. His date of birth is uncertain (around 1489). His father was a merchant. Otherwise little is known about Correggio's early life or training. It is, however, often assumed that he had his first artistic education from his father's brother, the painter Lorenzo Allegri.
In 1503-5 he was apprenticed to Francesco Bianchi Ferrara in Modena, where he probably became familiar with the classicism of artists like Lorenzo Costa and Francesco Francia, evidence of which can be found in his first works. After a trip to Mantua in 1506, he returned to Correggio, where he stayed until 1510. To this period is assigned the Adoration of the Child with St. Elizabeth and John, which shows clear influences from Costa and Mantegna. In

Caroline Chariot-Dayez (b. Brussels, 11 September 1958) is a Belgian hyperrealistic painter.
Although interested in painting from a very early age, she studied philosophy in order to understand what painting is. She was deeply influenced by the French phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who wrote extensively on perception, vision, embodiment, and painting.
Her life has been an ongoing interaction between philosophy, which she teaches, and painting. Until the age of forty, she was reluctant to show her paintings in public (with the exception of an appearance on the Belgian Broadcasting Corporation programme "The Arts at Large" in 1995).
She lives and works in Brussels.

Gustave Caillebotte (French pronunciation: [ɡystav kajbɔt]; 19 August 1848 – 21 February 1894) was a French painter, member and patron of the group of artists known as Impressionists, though he painted in a much more realistic manner than many other artists in the group. Caillebotte was noted for his early interest in photography as an art form.
Gustave Caillebotte was born on 19 August 1848 to an upper-class Parisian family living in the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis. His father, Martial Caillebotte (1799–1874), was the inheritor of the family's military textile business and was also a judge at the Seine department's Tribunal de Commerce. Caillebotte's father was twice widowed before marrying Caillebotte's mother, Céleste Daufresne (1819–1878), who had two more sons after Gustave, René (1851–1876) and Martial (1853–1910). Caillebotte was born at home on rue du Faubourg-Saint-Denis in Paris, and lived there until 1866 when his father had a home built on rue de Miromesnil. Beginning in 1860, the Caillebotte family began spending many of their summers in Yerres, a town on the Yerres River about 12 miles south of Paris, where Martial Caillebotte, Sr. had purchased a large property. It

Mathew B. Brady (ca. 1822 – January 15, 1896) was one of the most celebrated 19th century American photographers, best known for his portraits of celebrities and his documentation of the American Civil War. He is credited with being the father of photojournalism.
Brady was born in Warren County, New York, the youngest of three children of Irish immigrant parents, Andrew and Julia Brady. At age 16 he moved to Saratoga, New York, where he met famed portrait painter William Page. Brady became Page's student. In 1839 the two traveled to Albany, New York, and then to New York City, where Brady continued to study painting with Page, and also with Page's former teacher, Samuel F. B. Morse. Morse had met Louis Jacques Daguerre in France in 1839, and returned to the US to enthusiastically push the new daguerrotype invention of capturing images. He soon became the center of the New York artistic colony who wished to study photography. He opened a studio and offered classes; Brady was one of the first students. In 1844 Brady opened his own photography studio in New York, and by 1845 he began to exhibit his portraits of famous Americans. He opened a studio in Washington, D.C. in 1849, where he

Paul Nash (11 May 1889 – 11 July 1946) was a British painter, surrealist and war artist, as well as a book-illustrator, writer and designer of applied art. He was the older brother of the artist John Nash.
The son of a successful lawyer and a mentally unstable mother who died in a mental asylum in 1910, Nash was born in London on 11 May 1889. He was educated at St Paul's School, and originally intended for a career in the Navy, like his maternal grandfather. However, he failed his exams, and decided instead to take up art as a career. Studying first at the Chelsea Polytechnic, he went on to the London County Council School of Photo-engraving and Lithography, where his work was spotted and praised by Selwyn Image. He was advised by his friend, the poet Gordon Bottomley, and by the artist William Rothenstein, that he should attend the Slade School of Art at University College, London. He enrolled there in October 1910, though he later recorded that on his first meeting with the Professor of Drawing, Henry Tonks, 'It was evident he considered that neither the Slade, nor I, were likely to derive much benefit'.
The Slade was then opening its doors to a remarkable crop of young talents –

Pedro Berruguete (c. 1450 – 1504) was a Spanish painter; his art is regarded as a transitional style between gothic and Renaissance. Berruguete painted famous paintings of the Inquisition. Born in Paredes de Nava, Spain, he went to Italy in 1480 and worked in Federico III da Montefeltro's court in Urbino, where he could see some works by Melozzo da Forlì. Here he painted the Portrait of Federico da Montefeltro with His Son Guidobaldo (c. 1475), now at the Galleria nazionale delle Marche.
He returned to Spain in 1482 and painted in several cities, such as Sevilla, Toledo and Ávila. He was the father of an important sculptor, Alonso Berruguete, considered the most important sculptor in Renaissance Spain.
Works from his first stage (between 1470 and 1471) include Verification of the cross of Christ in the Church of San Juan de Paredes de Nava and the Adoration of the Magi in the Alvarez Fisa collection.
In his second stage he travelled in Italy. There is little documentation of the work of Berruguete at this time, and there are controversies as to authorship. Particularly remarkable is the Portrait of Federico da Montefeltro and his son Guidobaldo (Gallery of the Marches, Ducal Palace

Pierre-Auguste Renoir (US /rɛnˈwɑr/ or UK /ˈrɛnwɑr/; French: [pjɛʁ oɡyst ʁənwaʁ]; 1841–1919) was a French artist who was a leading painter in the development of the Impressionist style. As a celebrator of beauty, and especially feminine sensuality, it has been said that "Renoir is the final representative of a tradition which runs directly from Rubens to Watteau."
Pierre-Auguste was the father of actor Pierre Renoir and filmmaker Jean Renoir.
Pierre-Auguste Renoir was born in Limoges, Haute-Vienne, France, the child of a working-class family. As a boy, he worked in a porcelain factory where his drawing talents led to his being chosen to paint designs on fine china. He also painted hangings for overseas missionaries and decorations on fans before he enrolled in art school. During those early years, he often visited the Louvre to study the French master painters.
In 1862, he began studying art under Charles Gleyre in Paris. There he met Alfred Sisley, Frédéric Bazille, and Claude Monet. At times during the 1860s, he did not have enough money to buy paint. Although Renoir first started exhibiting paintings at the Paris Salon in 1864, recognition did not come for another ten years,

Władysław Ślewiński (1854–1918) was a Polish painter. He was one of Gauguin's students and a leading artist of the Young Poland movement.
Władysław Ślewiński was a Polish painter. He administered his estate in Poland before traveling to Paris in 1888. Once there he studied at the Académie Colarossi where he met Gauguin. The impression this encounter made on him and Gauguin's encouragement prompted Slewinski to dedicate himself to art. He submitted to Gauguin's artistic and personal influence, spending time with him in Paris and, from 1889, in Pont-Aven and Le Pouldu in Brittany.
Seascapes painted during this period include Cliffs in Brittany. In 1891 Gauguin painted a portrait of Slewinski and presented it to him. During this period Slewinski exhibited in Paris, with some success, both at the Salon des Independents from 1895-1896 and the Galerie Georges Thomas from 1897-1898.
Ślewiński's philosophy of art seems to stem from an excerpted statement of his about Gauguin: "He is so much an artist that he has to be wholly accepted or else rejected. I can feel him and accept him totally, for he suits my ideas of art and beauty". Beginning with his early works, he simplified forms and

Yoshitaka Amano (天野 喜孝 (formerly 天野 嘉孝), Amano Yoshitaka, born July 28, 1952) is a Japanese artist, character designer, illustrator and a theatre and film scenic designer and costume designer. He first came into prominence in the late 1960s working on the anime adaptation of Speed Racer. Amano later became the creator of iconic and influential characters such as Gatchaman, Tekkaman: The Space Knight, Hutch the Honeybee and Casshan. In 1982 he went independent and became a freelance artist, finding success as an illustrator for numerous authors, and worked on many best selling novels such as The Guin Saga and Vampire Hunter D. He is also known for his commissioned illustrations for the popular video-game franchise Final Fantasy.
Since the 1990s Amano has been creating and exhibiting paintings featuring his iconic retro pop icons in galleries around the world, primarily painting on aluminium box panels with acrylic and automotive paint. He is a 5 time winner of the Seiun Award, and also won the 1999 Bram Stoker Award for his collaboration with Neil Gaiman, Sandman: The Dream Hunters.
Amano's influences include early Western comic books, art nouveau, and Japanese woodblock prints. In

Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Baronet, PRA (/ˈmɪleɪ/; 8 June 1829 – 13 August 1896) was an English painter and illustrator and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
Millais (pronounced Mih-lay) was born in Southampton, England in 1829, of a prominent Jersey-based family. The author Thackeray once asked him "when England conquered Jersey." Millais replied "Never! Jersey conquered England." (cited in Chums annual, 1896, page 213). His prodigious artistic talent won him a place at the Royal Academy schools at the unprecedented age of eleven. While there, he met William Holman Hunt and Dante Gabriel Rossetti with whom he formed the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (known as the "PRB") in September 1848 in his family home on Gower Street, off Bedford Square.
Millais's Christ In The House Of His Parents (1850) was highly controversial because of its realistic portrayal of a working class Holy Family labouring in a messy carpentry workshop. Later works were also controversial, though less so. Millais achieved popular success with A Huguenot (1852), which depicts a young couple about to be separated because of religious conflicts. He repeated this theme in many later works. All

Alan Lee (20 August 1947) is an English book illustrator and movie conceptual designer. He was born in Middlesex, England and studied at the Ealing School of Art.
Lee has illustrated several fantasy books including some nonfiction and has illustrated dozens of covers. Among the most notable interiors are several works of J.R.R. Tolkien: the centenary edition of The Lord of the Rings (1991), a 1995 edition of The Hobbit, and the first edition of Narn i Chîn Húrin: the tale of the children of Húrin (2007). The latter is his work most widely held in WorldCat participating libraries. Other books he has illustrated include Faeries (with Brian Froud), Lavondyss by Robert Holdstock (as well as the cover of an early print of this book), The Mabinogion, Castles and Tolkien's Ring (both by David Day), The Mirrorstone by Michael Palin, The Moon's Revenge by Joan Aiken and Merlin Dreams by Peter Dickinson. He has also illustrated Rosemary Sutcliff's adaptations of the Iliad and the Odyssey (Black Ships Before Troy) and The Wanderings of Odysseus) and did a cover painting for Mervyn Peake's Titus Groan. Alan did the artwork for the CD Alive! by the Dutch band Omnia, released on 3 August 2007

Amedeo Clemente Modigliani (Italian pronunciation: [a:meˈde:o mo:diˈʎa:ni]; July 12, 1884 – January 24, 1920) was an Italian painter and sculptor who worked mainly in France. Primarily a figurative artist, he became known for paintings and sculptures in a modern style characterized by mask-like faces and elongation of form. He died in Paris of tubercular meningitis, exacerbated by poverty, overwork and addiction to alcohol and narcotics.
Modigliani was born into a Jewish family in Livorno, Italy. A port city, Livorno had long served as a refuge for those persecuted for their religion, and was home to a large Jewish community. His maternal great-great-grandfather, Solomon Garsin, had immigrated to Livorno in the 18th century as a refugee.
Modigliani's mother (Eugénie Garsin) who was born and grew up in Marseille, was descended from an intellectual, scholarly family of Sephardic Jews, generations of whom had resided along the Mediterranean coastline. Her ancestors were learned people, fluent in many languages, known authorities on sacred Jewish texts and founders of a school of Talmudic studies. Family legend traced the Garsins' lineage to the 17th-century Dutch philosopher Baruch

Giorgio de Chirico (Italian pronunciation: [ˈdʒordʒo deˈkiːriko]; July 10, 1888 – November 20, 1978) was a Greek-born Italian artist. In the years before World War I, he founded the scuola metafisica art movement, which profoundly influenced the surrealists. After 1919 he became interested in traditional painting techniques, and worked in a neoclassical or neo-Baroque style, while frequently revisiting the metaphysical themes of his earlier work.
He was born in Volos, Greece, to a Genovese mother and a Sicilian father. After studying art in Athens—mainly under the guidance of the influential Greek painter Georgios Roilos—and Florence, De Chirico moved to Germany in 1906, following his father's death in 1905. He entered the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, where he read the writings of the philosophers Nietzsche, Arthur Schopenhauer and Otto Weininger and studied the works of Arnold Böcklin and Max Klinger.
He returned to Italy in the summer of 1909 and spent six months in Milan. At the beginning of 1910, he moved to Florence where he painted the first of his 'Metaphysical Town Square' series, The Enigma of an Autumn Afternoon, after the revelation he felt in Piazza Santa Croce. He

Hugo Gilberto Cifuentes Navarro (Otavalo - Ecuador, 1923 - Quito - Ecuador, 2000) was a pioneering Latin American photographer.
Cifuentes began studying drawing and painting in the 1940s, before turning to photography. Cifuentes received his first prize for photographic composition in 1949. In the 1960s, Cifuentes joined VAN (Vanguardia Artística Nacional) — a group of progressive Informalist artists, founded by Enrique Tábara, who broke prevailing art tradition and found inspiration from the Constructivist Movement, Surrealist Movement and Pre-Columbian art. VAN strongly opposed Communist political views and searched for new artistic pathways while staying connected to their roots.
As Cifuentes developed his own visual vocabulary, humorous undertones became evident in his art. Cifuentes responded to internal conflicts and other miseries that gripped Ecuador with humor. By seeing things from a different angle, Cifuentes added new layers to the often hard realities.
In 1983, Cifuentes won the Casa de las Américas Award.

Jeffrey "Jeff" Koons (born January 21, 1955) is an American artist known for his reproductions of banal objects—such as Balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror finish surfaces. He lives and works in New York City and his hometown York, Pennsylvania.
Koons' work has sold for substantial sums of money including at least one world record auction price for a work by a living artist. The largest sum known to be paid for a work by Koons is Balloon flower (Magenta) which was sold for £12,921,250 (US$25,765,204) at Christie's London on June 30, 2008 (Lot 00012) in the Post-War & Contemporary Art Evening Sale.
Critics are sharply divided in their views of Koons. Some view his work as pioneering and of major art-historical importance. Others dismiss his work as kitsch: crass and based on cynical self-merchandising. Koons has stated that there are no hidden meanings in his works, nor any critiques.
Koons was born in York, Pennsylvania. His father Henry Koons was a furniture dealer and interior decorator; his mother Gloria, a housewife and seamstress. As a child he went door to door after school selling gift-wrapping paper and candy to earn pocket-money. As a teenager he

Paul Signac (French pronunciation: [pɔl siɲak]; 11 November 1863 – 15 August 1935) was a French neo-impressionist painter who, working with Georges Seurat, helped develop the pointillist style.
Paul Victor Jules Signac was born in Paris on 11 November 1863. He followed a course of training in architecture before deciding at the age of 18 to pursue a career as a painter after attending an exhibit of Monet's work. He sailed around the coasts of Europe, painting the landscapes he encountered. He also painted scenes of cities in France in his later years.
In 1884 he met Claude Monet and Georges Seurat. He was struck by the systematic working methods of Seurat and by his theory of colors and became Seurat's faithful supporter. Under his influence he abandoned the short brushstrokes of impressionism to experiment with scientifically juxtaposed small dots of pure color, intended to combine and blend not on the canvas but in the viewer's eye, the defining feature of pointillism.
Many of Signac's paintings are of the French coast. He loved to paint the water. He left the capital each summer, to stay in the south of France in the village of Collioure or at St. Tropez, where he bought a house

Grant DeVolson Wood (February 13, 1891 – February 12, 1942) was an American painter, born four miles east of Anamosa, Iowa. He is best known for his paintings depicting the rural American Midwest, particularly the painting American Gothic, an iconic image of the 20th century.
His family moved to Cedar Rapids after his father died in 1901. Soon thereafter he began as an apprentice in a local metal shop. After graduating from Washington High School, Wood enrolled in an art school in Minneapolis in 1910, and returned a year later to teach in a one-room schoolhouse. In 1913 he enrolled at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and did some work as a silversmith.
From 1920 to 1928, he made four trips to Europe, where he studied many styles of painting, especially Impressionism and Post-Impressionism. But it was the work of the 15th-century Flemish artist Jan van Eyck that influenced him to take on the clarity of this new technique and to incorporate it in his new works. From 1924 to 1935, Wood lived in the loft of a carriage house that he turned into his personal studio at "5 Turner Alley" (the studio had no address until Wood made one up himself). In 1932, Wood helped found the

Hans Holbein the Younger (c. 1497 – between 7 October and 29 November 1543) was a German artist and printmaker who worked in a Northern Renaissance style. He is best known as one of the greatest portraitists of the 16th century. He also produced religious art, satire, and Reformation propaganda, and made a significant contribution to the history of book design. He is called "the Younger" to distinguish him from his father, Hans Holbein the Elder, an accomplished painter of the Late Gothic school.
Born in Augsburg, Holbein worked mainly in Basel as a young artist. At first he painted murals and religious works and designed for stained glass windows and printed books. He also painted the occasional portrait, making his international mark with portraits of the humanist Desiderius Erasmus of Rotterdam. When the Reformation reached Basel, Holbein worked for reformist clients while continuing to serve traditional religious patrons. His Late Gothic style was enriched by artistic trends in Italy, France, and the Netherlands, as well as by Renaissance Humanism. The result was a combined aesthetic uniquely his own.
Holbein travelled to England in 1526 in search of work, with a recommendation

Jean (or Jehan) Fouquet (1420–1481) was a preeminent French painter of the 15th century, a master of both panel painting and manuscript illumination, and the apparent inventor of the portrait miniature. He was the first French artist to travel to Italy and experience first-hand the early Italian Renaissance.
Jean Fouquet was born in Tours. Little is known of his life, but it is certain that he was in Italy before 1447, where he executed a portrait of Pope Eugene IV who died in that year (the portrait survives only in much later copies). Upon his return to France, while retaining his purely French sentiment, he grafted the elements of the Tuscan style, which he had acquired during his period in Italy, upon the style of the Van Eycks, forming the basis of early 15th-century French art and becoming the founder of an important new school. He worked for the French court, including Charles VII, the treasurer Étienne Chevalier, and the chancellor Guillaume Jouvenel des Ursins. Near the end of his career, he became court painter to Louis XI. His work can be associated with the French court's attempt to solidify French national identity in the wake of its long struggle with England in the

Adolph Friedrich Erdmann von Menzel (December 8, 1815 – February 9, 1905) was a German artist noted for drawings, etchings, and paintings. Along with Caspar David Friedrich, he is considered one of the two most prominent German artists of the 19th century, and was the most successful artist of his era in Germany. His popularity in his native country, owing especially to politically propagandistic works, was such that few of his major paintings left Germany, as many were quickly acquired by museums in Berlin. Menzel's graphic works and drawings were more widely disseminated; these, along with informal paintings not initially intended for display, have largely accounted for his posthumous reputation.
Although he traveled in order to find subjects for his art, to visit exhibitions, and to meet with other artists, Menzel spent most of his life in Berlin, and was, despite numerous friendships, by his own admission detached from others. It is likely that he felt socially estranged for physical reasons alone—Menzel had a large head, and stood about four foot six inches.
He was born in Breslau. His father was a lithographer and intended to educate his son as a professor; however, he would

Alonso González de Berruguete (Alonso Berruguete) (c. 1488 – 1561) was a Spanish painter, sculptor and architect. He is considered to be the most important sculptor of the Spanish Renaissance, and is known for his emotive sculptures depicting religious ecstasy or torment.
Born in the town of Paredes de Nava, Berrugete studied art under the tutelage of his father, the painter Pedro Berruguete. Following his father's death in 1504, Berruguete travelled to Italy to continue with his study of art, spending most of his time in Florence and Rome. It is here that he studied sculpture under the Italian Master, Michelangelo. His paintings produced in Italy showed a mannerist influence, with his art being compared with contemporaries such as Jacopo Pontormo and Rosso Fiorentino.
Berruguete returned to Spain in 1517, and in 1518, was appointed to the position of court painter and sculptor by Charles V of Spain. From this point in his career forward, Berruguete concentrated on sculpture. Works of his include an altar piece at the Irish college in Salamanca (1529–1533), choir stalls at the Cathedral of Toledo (1539–1543) and a tomb for the Archbishop of Toledo Juan de Tavera at the hospital

Gilbert Charles Stuart (born Stewart) (December 3, 1755 – July 9, 1828) was an American painter from Rhode Island.
Gilbert Stuart is widely considered to be one of America's foremost portraitists. His best known work, the unfinished portrait of George Washington that is sometimes referred to as The Athenaeum, was begun in 1796 and never finished; Stuart retained the portrait and used it to paint 130 copies which he sold for $100 each. The image of George Washington featured in the painting has appeared on the United States one-dollar bill for over a century, and on various U.S. Postage stamps of the 19th century and early 20th century.
Throughout his career, Gilbert Stuart produced portraits of over 1,000 people, including the first six Presidents of the United States. His work can be found today at art museums across the United States and the United Kingdom, most notably the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Frick Collection in New York City, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the National Portrait Gallery in London, Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts, and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Gilbert Stuart was born in Saunderstown, Rhode Island on December 3, 1755 and

Honoré Daumier (French pronunciation: [ɔnɔʁe domje]; February 26, 1808 – February 10, 1879) was a French printmaker, caricaturist, painter, and sculptor, whose many works offer commentary on social and political life in France in the 19th century.
A prolific draftsman who produced over 500 paintings, 4000 lithographs, 1000 wood engravings, 1000 drawings, 100 sculptures he was perhaps best known for his caricatures of political figures and satires on the behavior of his countrymen, although posthumously the value of his painting has also been recognized.
Daumier was born in Marseille to Jean-Baptiste Louis Daumier and Cécile Catherine Philippe. His father Jean-Baptiste was a glazier whose literary aspirations led him to move to Paris in 1814, seeking to be published as a poet. In 1816 the young Daumier and his mother followed Jean-Baptiste to Paris. Daumier showed in his youth an irresistible inclination towards the artistic profession, which his father vainly tried to check by placing him first with a huissier, for whom he was employed as an errand boy, and later, with a bookseller. In 1822 he became protégé to Alexandre Lenoir, a friend of Daumier's father who was an artist and

Joseph Wright (3 September 1734 – 29 August 1797), styled Wright of Derby, was an English landscape and portrait painter. He has been acclaimed as "the first professional painter to express the spirit of the Industrial Revolution".
Wright is notable for his use of Chiaroscuro effect, which emphasises the contrast of light and dark, and for his paintings of candle-lit subjects. His paintings of the birth of science out of alchemy, often based on the meetings of the Lunar Society, a group of very influential scientists and industrialists living in the English Midlands, are a significant record of the struggle of science against religious values in the period known as the Age of Enlightenment.
Many of Wright's paintings and drawings are owned by Derby City Council, and are on display at the Derby Museum and Art Gallery, from where they are occasionally loaned to other galleries.
Joseph Wright was born in Irongate, Derby, the son of John Wright (1697–1767) an attorney, who was afterwards town-clerk and his wife, Hannah Brookes (1700–1764); he was the third of their five children. Wright was educated at Derby grammar school and taught himself to draw by copying prints. Deciding to

Édouard Manet (US /mæˈneɪ/ or UK /ˈmæneɪ/; French: [edwaʁ manɛ]; 1832–1883) was a French painter. One of the first 19th-century artists to approach modern-life subjects, he was a pivotal figure in the transition from Realism to Impressionism.
His early masterworks, The Luncheon on the Grass (Le déjeuner sur l'herbe) and Olympia, engendered great controversy and served as rallying points for the young painters who would create Impressionism. Today, these are considered watershed paintings that mark the genesis of modern art.
Born into an upper class household with strong political connections, Manet rejected the future originally envisioned for him, and became engrossed in the world of painting. He married Suzanne Leenhoff in 1863. The last 20 years of Manet's life saw him form bonds with other great artists of the time, and develop his own style that would be heralded as innovative and serve as a major influence for future painters.
Édouard Manet was born in Paris on 23 January 1832, to an affluent and well connected family. His mother, Eugénie-Desirée Fournier, was the daughter of a diplomat and goddaughter of the Swedish crown prince Charles Bernadotte, from whom the current

Marcel Duchamp (28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968; French pronunciation: [maʁsɛl dyˈʃɑ̃]) was a French artist whose work is most often associated with the Dadaist and Surrealist movements. Considered by some to be one of the most important artists of the 20th century, Duchamp's output influenced the development of post-World War I Western art. He advised modern art collectors, such as Peggy Guggenheim and other prominent figures, thereby helping to shape the tastes of Western art during this period.
Duchamp challenged conventional thought about artistic processes and art marketing, not so much by writing, but through subversive actions. He famously dubbed a urinal art and named it Fountain, though in a 1917 letter to his sister Duchamp indicates that a female friend, possibly the Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, conceived of the urinal as sculpture and sent it to him under the pseudonym Richard Mutt. Duchamp produced relatively few artworks, while moving quickly through the avant-garde circles of his time.
Duchamp went on to abandon art and devoted the rest of his life to chess.
Marcel Duchamp was born in Blainville-Crevon Seine-Maritime in the Upper Normandy region of France,

Master of the Embroidered Foliage (active 1480 – 1510) was a Netherlandish painter or a group of painters who worked out of Bruges and Brussels.
In 1926 the German art historian Max Jakob Friedländer attributed a group of paintings of the Virgin and Child in a landscape, in identical poses to "Master of the Embroidered Foliage." The foliage painted in these works was likened by Friedländer to the repeated pattern of stitches in embroidery, thus the unusual name for the artist. The paintings show elements of previous works by Rogier van der Weyden and Hans Memling. There are at least five versions, including three in the United States: Philadelphia Museum of Art, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and Clark Art Institute. The other two are at Groeningemuseum, Bruges, and at Musée des Beaux-Arts, Lille.
The Clark Art Institute concludes their investigation of the paintings as follows: "Our analysis, based on laboratory study and consideration of fifteenth-century workshop practices, demonstrates that these panels were all produced between 1482 and the early 16th century not by one but by several artists, perhaps sharing a common template for the main figures. Unless further conclusive

Alonso Sánchez Coello (1531/32 – August 8, 1588) was a portrait painter of the Spanish Renaissance and one of the pioneers of the great tradition of Spanish portrait painting.
Alonso Sánchez Coello was born in Benifairó de les Valls, near Valencia, and spent his childhood there, until the death of his father when he was around ten years old. He was educated in Portugal at his grandfather's home. Coello's years in Portugal and his family name of Portuguese origin (Coelho) led to a long-standing belief that he was in fact Portuguese. His grandfather (after whom he was named) was in the service of King John III of Portugal who sent the young painter to study with Anthonis Mor (also known as Antonio Moro) in Flanders around 1550. He was under the service of Antoine de Granville, bishop of Arras, learning from Mor. While studying in Flanders, Coello also spent time copying some of Titian's works.
In 1552, the painter went to Lisbon with Anthonis Mor when Charles V commissioned Mor to paint the Portuguese royal family. For a few years, Sánchez Coello remained in Portugal working for the court of the heir to the throne, John, Crown Prince of Portugal. After the prince's death, Sánchez

Artworks:Triptych of the Carpenters and Masons Corporation of Brussels

Associated periods or movements:

Art Forms:Painting

Bernard van Orley (between 1487 and 1491 – 6 January 1541), also called Barend or Barent van Orley, Bernaert van Orley or Barend van Brussel, was a Flemish Northern Renaissance painter and draughtsman, and also a leading designer of Brussels tapestry and stained glass. He is counted among a group of painters belonging to the Romanism school of painting, who has not been given enough attention by the general public.
His family came originally from Luxembourg, descendants from the Seigneurs d'Ourle or d'Orley. His branch of the family then moved to the Duchy of Brabant, where his father Valentin van Orley (ca. 1466-Brussels 1532) was born as an illegitimate child and lost his noble lineage. Bernard and his brother Everard (who would also become a painter) were both born in Brussels.
The painted wing panels of the sculpted Saluzzo retable are attributed to Valentin van Orley, describing the Life of St. Joseph (ca. 1510). The retable itself is Gothic in style, but these wing panels already show some characteristic of the Renaissance style (City Museum of Brussels). The panels of the Life of St. Roch in the Saint James' Church, Antwerp have been ascribed to Everard van Orley.
In 1512

El Greco, born Doménikos Theotokópoulos, (1541 – 7 April 1614) was a painter, sculptor and architect of the Spanish Renaissance. "El Greco" (The Greek) was a nickname, a reference to his national Greek origin, and the artist normally signed his paintings with his full birth name in Greek letters, Δομήνικος Θεοτοκόπουλος (Doménikos Theotokópoulos), often adding the word Κρής (Krēs, "Cretan").
El Greco was born in Crete, which was at that time part of the Republic of Venice, and the center of Post-Byzantine art. He trained and became a master within that tradition before travelling at age 26 to Venice, as other Greek artists had done. In 1570 he moved to Rome, where he opened a workshop and executed a series of works. During his stay in Italy, El Greco enriched his style with elements of Mannerism and of the Venetian Renaissance. In 1577, he moved to Toledo, Spain, where he lived and worked until his death. In Toledo, El Greco received several major commissions and produced his best-known paintings.
El Greco's dramatic and expressionistic style was met with puzzlement by his contemporaries but found appreciation in the 20th century. El Greco is regarded as a precursor of both

Georges Pierre Seurat (French pronunciation: [ʒɔʁʒ pjɛʁ søʁa]; 2 December 1859 – 29 March 1891) was a French Post-Impressionist painter and draftsman. He is noted for his innovative use of drawing media and for devising a technique of painting known as pointillism. His large-scale work A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte (1884–1886) altered the direction of modern art by initiating Neo-impressionism. It is one of the icons of late 19th-century painting.
Seurat was born into a wealthy family in Paris, France. His father, Antoine Chrysostome Seurat, was a legal official and a native of Champagne; his mother, Ernestine Faivre, was Parisian.
Georges Seurat first studied art with Justin Lequien, a sculptor. Seurat attended the École des Beaux-Arts in 1878 and 1879. After a year of service at Brest Military Academy, he returned to Paris in 1880. He shared a small studio on the Left Bank with two student friends before moving to a studio of his own. For the next two years, he worked at mastering the art of black-and-white drawing. He spent 1883 on his first major painting—a huge canvas titled Bathers at Asnières.
After his painting was rejected by the Paris Salon, Seurat

Marco Palmezzano (Forlì, 1460 – 1539) was an Italian painter and architect, belonging to the Forlì painting school, who painted in a style recalling earlier Northern Renaissance models, and was mostly active near Forlì.
Palmezzano was born in Forlì, Romagna.
After his initial training with the painter Melozzo da Forlì — who had collaborated with Piero della Francesca and was widely esteemed as a master of perspective and foreshortening techniques— Palmezzano went to Rome in the early 1490s.
It is rumored that Palmezzano may have then traveled to Jerusalem to join the team painting frescoes at the Holy Cross church there, but no documentary evidence exists. He is, however, noted in property records as residing in Venice in 1495. Shortly thereafter, Palmezzano returned to Forlì, where he spent the rest of his long life—apparently with only brief excursions connected with commissions in other places in the region—until his death in 1539.
Palmezzano's studio was prolific in producing altarpieces, most commonly featuring the iconic arrangement of an enthroned Virgin with child on her lap, while below, symmetrically sited in the foreground are flanking saints. Venetian painting, in

Mark Rothko (Russian: Марк Ро́тко; born Ма́ркус Я́ковлевич Ротко́вич Marcus Yakovlevich Rothkowitz; September 25, 1903 – February 25, 1970) was a Russian-American painter. He is classified as an abstract expressionist, although he himself rejected this label, and even resisted classification as an "abstract painter".
Mark Rothko was born in Dvinsk, Vitebsk Province, Russian Empire (now Daugavpils, Latvia). His father, Jacob (Yakov) Rothkowitz, was a pharmacist and an intellectual, who provided his children with a secular and political, rather than religious, upbringing. Unlike Jews in most cities of Czarist Russia, those in Dvinsk had been spared from violent outbreaks of anti-Semitic pogroms. However, in an environment where Jews were often blamed for many of the evils that befell Russia, Rothko’s early childhood was plagued by fear.
Despite Jacob Rothkowitz's modest income, the family was highly educated, and able to speak Russian, Yiddish and Hebrew. Following Jacob's return to Orthodox Judaism, he sent Marcus, his youngest son, to the cheder at the age of 5, where he studied the Talmud although his elder siblings had been educated in the public school system.
Fearing that his

Jacopo Carucci (May 24, 1494 – January 2, 1557), usually known as Jacopo da Pontormo, Jacopo Pontormo or simply Pontormo, was an Italian Mannerist painter and portraitist from the Florentine school. His work represents a profound stylistic shift from the calm perspectival regularity that characterized the art of the Florentine Renaissance. He is famous for his use of twining poses, coupled with ambiguous perspective; his figures often seem to float in an uncertain environment, unhampered by the forces of gravity.
Jacopo Carucci was born at Pontorme, near Empoli, to Bartolomeo di Jacopo di Martino Carrucci and Alessandra di Pasquale di Zanobi. Vasari relates how the orphaned boy, "young, melancholy and lonely," was shuttled around as a young apprentice:
Jacopo had not been many months in Florence before Bernardo Vettori sent him to stay with Leonardo da Vinci, and then with Mariotto Albertinelli, Piero di Cosimo, and finally, in 1512, with Andrea del Sarto, with whom he did not remain long, for after he had done the cartoons for the arch of the Servites, it does not seem that Andrea bore him any good will, whatever the cause may have been.
Pontormo painted in and around Florence,

Andrea del Verrocchio (c. 1435–1488), born in Andrea di Michele di Francesco de' Cioni, was an Italian sculptor, goldsmith and painter who worked at the court of Lorenzo de' Medici in Florence in the early renaissance. Few paintings are attributed to him with certainty, but a number of important painters were trained at his workshop. His pupils included Leonardo da Vinci, Pietro Perugino and Lorenzo di Credi. His greatest importance was as a sculptor and his last work, the equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni in Venice, is universally accepted as a masterpiece.
Verrocchio was born in Florence in or about 1435. His father was Michele di Francesco Cioni, who worked as a tile and brick maker and, later, as a tax collector. Verrocchio never married, and had to provide financial support for some members of his family. He was at first apprenticed to a goldsmith. It has been suggested that he was later apprenticed to Donatello, but there is no evidence of this and Pope-Hennessy considered that it is contradicted by the style of his early works. It has been suggested that he was trained as a painter under Fra Filippo Lippi. Little is known about his life. His main works are dated in

Antonello da Messina, properly Antonello di Giovanni di Antonio (c. 1430 – February 1479) was an Italian painter from Messina, Sicily, active during the Italian Renaissance. His work shows strong influences from Early Netherlandish painting and, unusually for a painter from Southern Italy, he was influential on the art of Northern Italy, especially Venice.
Antonello was born at Messina around 1429-1431, to Giovanni de Antonio Mazonus and Garita (Margherita). He was probably apprenticed both in his native city and in Palermo.
Around the year 1450, according to a 1524 letter of the Neapolitan humanist Pietro Summonte, he was a pupil of the painter Niccolò Colantonio at Naples, at the time one of the most active centres of Renaissance arts.
Around 1455 he painted the so-called Sibiu Crucifixion, which was inspired by the Flemish Calvaries and is housed in the Muzeul de Artǎ in Bucharest. Of the same years is the Crucifixion in the Royal Museum of Antwerp: his early works shows a marked Flemish influence, which it is now understood he derived from his master Colantonio and from works by Rogier van der Weyden and Jan van Eyck that belonged to Colantonio's patron, Alfonso V of Aragon;

Carl Eduard Schuch (30 September 1846 - 13 September 1903) was an Austrian painter, born in Vienna, who spent most of his lifetime outside Austria, in Germany, Italy and France. He painted primarily still lifes and landscapes.
During the period 1882–94 he was based in Paris, where he was greatly impressed by the work of Claude Monet—whom he described as "the Rembrandt of plein-air painting"—although he was attracted most of all to Rembrandt and the artists of the Barbizon school. In 1884 and 1885 he spent the summer months in the Netherlands, studying the Dutch old masters as well as the contemporary painters of the Hague School, and filling notebooks with detailed descriptions of the colors he observed in paintings that he admired. Of all the artists belonging to the circle around Wilhelm Leibl (called the Leibl-Kreis), Schuch was the most devoted to color. His work marks the transition from the realist tradition to the modern movement in Vienna, esthetically, however, it is far from contemporary trends, and from its means and ends, comparable to Paul Cézanne (Gottfried Boehm, referring to Arnold Gehlen).
His later years were marked by a degenerative illness. He died in Vienna.

Jean Goujon (c.1510 – after 1572 ) was a French Renaissance sculptor and architect.
His early life is little known; he was probably born in Normandy and may have traveled in Italy. He worked at the church of Saint-Maclou, his earliest documented work, and the cathedral in Rouen, in 1541-42, where he executed the monument to Louis de Brézé, seigneur d'Anet, before arriving in Paris, where he collaborated with the architect Pierre Lescot at the church of Saint-Germain-l'Auxerrois about 1544, working on the pulpit, which was dismantled in the mid-eighteenth century. In 1544-1547 he was occupied with considerable works at the Château d’Ecouen for the connétable de Montmorency. He became "sculptor to the king" (Henry II of France) in 1547 and in the next years was occupied at the Château of Anet. He was imprisoned at Ecouen in 1555
His most famous works are the sculptural decorations made in collaboration with Lescot for the western extension of the Louvre, 1555-62. A fine representative of Mannerism in France, Goujon's figures are elongated, sensual and fluid; his drapery work reveals knowledge of Greek sculpture, though certainly not at first hand. He is also responsible for

Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (Italian pronunciation: [leoˈnardo da ˈvintʃi] pronunciation (help·info)) (April 15, 1452 – May 2, 1519, Old Style) was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer. His genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal. Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance Man, a man of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination". He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived. According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent and "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, the man himself mysterious and remote". Marco Rosci states that while there is much speculation about Leonardo, his vision of the world is essentially logical rather than mysterious, and that the empirical methods he employed were unusual for his time.
Born out of wedlock to a notary, Piero da Vinci, and a peasant woman,

Man Ray (born Emmanuel Radnitzky, August 27, 1890 – November 18, 1976) was an American modernist artist who spent most of his career in Paris, France. He was a significant contributor to the Dada and Surrealist movements, although his ties to each were informal. He produced major works in a variety of media but considered himself a painter above all. He was best known in the art world for his avant-garde photography, and he was a renowned fashion and portrait photographer. Ray is also noted for his work with photograms, which he called "rayographs" in reference to himself.
Ray's work was not appreciated during his lifetime, with the exception of his fashion and portrait photography; especially in his native United States. Nevertheless, his reputation has grown steadily in the decades since.
During his career as an artist, Man Ray allowed few details of his early life or family background to be known to the public. He even refused to acknowledge that he ever had a name other than Man Ray.
Man Ray was born as Emmanuel Radnitzky in South Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. in 1890. He was the eldest child of Russian Jewish immigrants. He had a brother and two sisters, the youngest born

Paul Klee (German pronunciation: [ˈkleː]; 18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, and is considered both a German and a Swiss painter. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. He was also a student of orientalism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually mastered colour theory, and wrote extensively about it; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are considered so important for modern art that they are compared to the importance that Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting had for Renaissance. He and his colleague, the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the German Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture. His works reflect his dry humour and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and also his musicality.
Paul Klee was born as the second child of the German music teacher Hans Wilhelm Klee (1849–1940) and the Swiss singer Ida Marie Klee, née Frick (1855–1921). His sister Mathilde (died 6 December

Piero di Cosimo (2 January 1462 – 1521), also known as Piero di Lorenzo, was an Italian Renaissance painter.
The son of a goldsmith, Piero was born in Florence and apprenticed under the artist Cosimo Rosseli, from whom he derived his popular name and whom he assisted in the painting of the Sistine Chapel in 1481.
In the first phase of his career, Piero was influenced by the Netherlandish naturalism of Hugo van der Goes, whose Portinari Triptych (now at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence) helped to lead the whole of Florentine painting into new channels. From him, most probably, Cosimo acquired the love of landscape and the intimate knowledge of the growth of flowers and of animal life. The manner of Hugo van der Goes is especially apparent in the Adoration of the Shepherds, at the Berlin Museum.
He journeyed to Rome in 1482 with his master, Rosselli. He proved himself a true child of the Renaissance by depicting subjects of Classical mythology in such pictures as the Venus, Mars, and Cupid, The Death of Procris, the Perseus and Andromeda series, at the Uffizi, and many others. Inspired to the Vitruvius' account of the evolution of man, Piero's mythical compositions show the bizarre

Bartolomeo Manfredi (baptised 25 August 1582 – 12 December 1622) was an Italian painter, a leading member of the Caravaggisti (followers of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio) of the early 17th century.
Manfredi was born in Ostiano, near Cremona. He may have been a pupil of Caravaggio in Rome—at his famous libel trial in 1603 Caravaggio mentioned that a certain Bartolomeo, accused of distributing scurrilous poems attacking Caravaggio's detested rival Baglione, had been a servant of his. Certainly the Bartolomeo Manfredi known to art history was a close follower of Caravaggio's innovatory style, with its enhanced chiaroscuro and insistence on naturalism, with a gift for story-telling through expression and body-language.
Caravaggio in his brief career—he rocketed to fame in 1600, was exiled from Rome in 1606, and was dead by 1610—had a profound effect on the younger generation of artists, particularly in Rome and Naples. And of these Caravaggisti (followers of Caravaggio), Manfredi seems in turn to have been the most influential in transmitting the master's legacy to the next generation, particularly with painters from France and the Netherlands who came to Italy. Unfortunately no

Considered one of the most influential contemporary American artists, Carrie Mae Weems has investigated yearning, loss, cultural identity, and the visual consequences of power throughout her renowned career. Weems received her B.A. from the California Institute of the Arts and an M.F.A. from the University of California at San Diego, and studied folklore at the University of California, Berkeley with the late Alan Dundes. She was awarded the Pollack Krasner Foundation Grant in Photography, the Visual Arts Grant from the National Endowment for the Arts, and is a recipient of the Joseph H. Hazen Rome Prize Fellowship, one of the most prestigious awards in American culture.

In 2005, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch called her series, From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried, which was originally commissioned by the J. Paul Getty Museum, "one of the masterpieces of our time." Weems has exhibited extensively throughout the United States, Europe, Africa, and Asia, and has had solo and group shows at the High Museum of Art, the International Center for Photography, the Miami Art Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Walker Art Center.

She is represented in public and private collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Museum of Modern Art. Her work has also been featured in Dak'Art, the Biennale of Contemporary Art in Senegal, the Johannesburg Biennale in South Africa, and the Whitney Biennial in the United States.

Franz Marc (February 8, 1880 – March 4, 1916) was a German painter and printmaker, one of the key figures of the German Expressionist movement. He was a founding member of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider), a journal whose name later became synonymous with the circle of artists collaborating in it.
Franz Marc was born in 1880 in Munich, then the capital of the Kingdom of Bavaria. His father, Wilhelm, was a professional landscape painter, and his mother Sophie was a strict Calvinist. In 1900, Marc began to study at the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, where his teachers would include Gabriel von Hackl and Wilhelm von Diez. In 1903 and 1907 he spent time in France, particularly in Paris, visiting the city's museums and copying many paintings, a traditional way that artists studied and developed technique. In Paris, Marc frequented artistic circles, and was able to meet numerous artists, including the actress Sarah Bernhardt. He discovered a strong affinity for the work of Vincent van Gogh.
During his twenties, Marc was involved in a number of stormy relationships, including a years-long affair with Annette von Eckardt, a married antique dealer who was nine years older than him. He

Ivan Aivazovsky (Armenian: Հովհաննես Այվազովսկի Hovhannes Aivasovsky, originally Aivazian; Russian: Иван Константинович Айвазовский) (July 29, 1817 – May 5, 1900) was a Russian world-renowned painter of Armenian descent living and working in Crimea, most famous for his seascapes, which constitute more than half of his paintings. Aivazovsky is widely considered as one of the greatest seascape painters of all times.
Aivazovsky was born in the town of Feodosiya (Theodosia), Crimea (Russian Empire) to a poor Armenian family. His brother was the Armenian Archbishop Gabriel Aivazovsky. His family moved to the Crimea from Galicia (then in southern Poland, now in Ukraine) in 1812. His parents' family name was Aivazian but in Poland it was written Haivazian. Some of the artist's paintings bear a signature, in Armenian letters, "Hovhannes Aivazian" (Հովհաննես Այվազյան). His father taught him to play the violin and speak Polish and Ukrainian fluently. His talent as an artist earned him sponsorship and entry to the Simferopol gymnasium №1 and later the St.Petersburg Academy of Arts, which he graduated with a gold medal. Earning awards for his early landscapes and seascapes, he went on to paint

John Singer Sargent (12 January 1856 – 14 April 1925) was an American artist, considered the "leading portrait painter of his generation" for his evocations of Edwardian era luxury. During his career, he created roughly 900 oil paintings and more than 2,000 watercolors, as well as countless sketches and charcoal drawings. His oeuvre documents worldwide travel, from Venice to the Tyrol, Corfu, the Middle East, Montana, Maine, and Florida.
His parents were American, but he was trained in Paris prior to moving to London. Sargent enjoyed international acclaim as a portrait painter, though not without controversy and some critical reservation; an early submission to the Paris Salon, his "Portrait of Madame X", was intended to consolidate his position as a society painter, but it resulted in scandal instead. From the beginning his work was characterized by remarkable technical facility, particularly in his ability to draw with a brush, which in later years inspired admiration as well as criticism for a supposed superficiality. His commissioned works were consistent with the grand manner of portraiture, while his informal studies and landscape paintings displayed a familiarity with

José Victoriano (Carmelo Carlos) González-Pérez (March 23, 1887 – May 11, 1927), better known as Juan Gris (Spanish pronunciation: [ˈxwaŋ ˈgɾis]), was a Spanish painter and sculptor who lived and worked in France most of his life. His works, which are closely connected to the emergence of an innovative artistic genre—Cubism—are among the movement's most distinctive.
Born in Madrid, Gris studied mechanical drawing at the Escuela de Artes y Manufacturas in Madrid from 1902 to 1904, during which time he contributed drawings to local periodicals. From 1904 to 1905, he studied painting with the academic artist José Maria Carbonero. It was in 1905 that José González adopted the more distinctive pseudonym Juan Gris.
In 1906 he moved to Paris and became friends with Henri Matisse, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, then in 1915 he was painted by his friend, Amedeo Modigliani. In Paris, Gris followed the lead of another friend and fellow countryman, Pablo Picasso. Although he submitted darkly humorous illustrations to journals such as Le Rire, L'assiette au beurre, Le Charivari, and Le Cri de Paris, Gris began to paint seriously in 1910, and by 1912 he had developed a personal Cubist style. His

Marc Zaharovich Chagall (/ʃəˈɡɑːl/ shə-GAHL; Yiddish: מאַרק זאַהאַראָוויטש שאַגאַל; Russian: Марк Заха́рович Шага́л; Belarusian: Марк Захаравіч Шагал;) (7 July [O.S. 24 June] 1887 – 28 March 1985), was a Russian-French artist associated with several major artistic styles and one of the most successful artists of the 20th century. He was an early modernist, and created works in virtually every artistic medium, including painting, book illustrations, stained glass, stage sets, ceramic, tapestries and fine art prints.
Art critic Robert Hughes referred to Chagall as "the quintessential Jewish artist of the twentieth century". According to art historian Michael J. Lewis, Chagall was considered to be "the last survivor of the first generation of European modernists". For decades, he "had also been respected as the world's preeminent Jewish artist". Using the medium of stained glass, he produced windows for the cathedrals of Reims and Metz, windows for the UN, and the Jerusalem Windows in Israel. He also did large-scale paintings, including part of the ceiling of the Paris Opéra.
Before World War I, he traveled between St. Petersburg, Paris, and Berlin. During this period he created his

Masaccio (Italian pronunciation: [maˈzattʃo]; December 21, 1401 – autumn 1428), born Tommaso di Ser Giovanni di Simone, was the first great painter of the Quattrocento period of the Italian Renaissance. According to Vasari, Masaccio was the best painter of his generation because of his skill at recreating lifelike figures and movements as well as a convincing sense of three-dimensionality. Masaccio died at twenty-six and little is known about the exact circumstances of his death.
The name Masaccio is a humorous version of Maso (short for Tommaso), meaning "clumsy" or "messy" Tom. The name may have been created to distinguish him from his principal collaborator, also called Maso, who came to be known as Masolino ("little/delicate Tom").
Despite his brief career, he had a profound influence on other artists. He was one of the first to use linear perspective in his painting, employing techniques such as vanishing point in art for the first time. He also moved away from the International Gothic style and elaborate ornamentation of artists like Gentile da Fabriano to a more naturalistic mode that employed perspective and chiaroscuro for greater realism.
Masaccio was born to Giovanni di

Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (April 6 or March 28, 1483 – April 6, 1520), better known simply as Raphael, was an Italian painter and architect of the High Renaissance. His work is admired for its clarity of form and ease of composition and for its visual achievement of the Neoplatonic ideal of human grandeur. Together with Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci, he forms the traditional trinity of great masters of that period.
Raphael was enormously productive, running an unusually large workshop, and despite his death at 37, a large body of his work remains. Many of his works are found in the Apostolic Palace of The Vatican, where the frescoed Raphael Rooms were the central, and the largest, work of his career. The best known work is The School of Athens in the Vatican Stanza della Segnatura. After his early years in Rome much of his work was self-designed, but for the most part executed by the workshop from his drawings, with considerable loss of quality. He was extremely influential in his lifetime, though outside Rome his work was mostly known from his collaborative printmaking. After his death, the influence of his great rival Michelangelo was more widespread until the 18th and 19th

Robert Walter Weir (June 18, 1803 – May 1, 1889) was an American artist, best known as an educator and as a historical painter. He is considered an artist of the Hudson River school. Weir was elected to the National Academy of Design in 1829, and an instructor at the United States Military Academy. Among his better-known works are The Embarkation of the Pilgrims (in the rotunda of the United States Capitol at Washington, D.C.) and Landing of Hendrik Hudson.
Robert Weir was born on June 18, 1803, in New Rochelle, New York to Robert and Mary Katherine (Brinkley) Weir. Weir never graduated from college and at age 18, in 1821, left a job as a mercantile clerk to pursue painting. He studied art in New York City from 1822–24, teaching himself drawing and painting, before departing in 1824 to study in Italy. He remained in Florence from 1824–25, and in Rome from 1825–27, during which time he studied the works of Michelangelo, Raphael, and other Italian masters of the Renaissance. Weir returned to New York in 1827 to accompany a sick friend. He remained in New York until 1834 and became an integral part of its artist. He was then appointed as Teacher of Drawing, later Professor of Drawing,

André-Adolphe-Eugène Disdéri (28 March 1819, Paris – 4 October 1889) was a French photographer who started his photographic career as a daguerreotypist but gained greater fame for patenting his version of the carte de visite, a small photographic image which was mounted on a card. Disdéri, a brilliant showman, made this system of mass-production portraiture world famous.
Disdéri began his working life in a number of occupations, also studying art. He started as a daguerreotypist in Brest in 1848 or 1849 but in 1852 moved to Paris, enabling easy access to people who would be the subjects of his cartes de visite.
Photographs had previously served as calling cards, but Disdéri's invention of the paper carte de visite (i.e. "visiting card") photograph first enabled the mass production of photographs. On 27 November 1854 he patented the system of printing ten photographs on a single sheet (although there is no evidence that a system printing more than eight actually materialized). This was the first patent ever for a carte de visite. Disdéri's's cartes de visite were 6×9 cm, about the size of conventional (nonphotographic) visiting cards of the time, and were made by a camera with four

Annibale Carracci (Italian pronunciation: [anˈnibale karˈrattʃi]; November 3, 1560 – July 15, 1609) was an Italian Baroque painter.
Annibale Carracci was born in Bologna, and in all likelihood was first apprenticed within his family. In 1582, Annibale, his brother Agostino and his cousin Ludovico Carracci opened a painters' studio, initially called by some the Academy of the Desiderosi (desirous of fame and learning) and subsequently the Incamminati (progressives; literally "of those opening a new way"). While the Carraccis laid emphasis on the typically Florentine linear draftsmanship, as exemplified by Raphael and Andrea del Sarto, their interest in the glimmering colours and mistier edges of objects derived from the Venetian painters, notably the works of Venetian oil painter Titian, which Annibale and Agostino studied during their travels around Italy in 1580-81 at the behest of the elder Caracci Lodovico. This eclecticism was to become the defining trait of the artists of the Baroque Emilian or Bolognese School.
In many early Bolognese works by the Carraccis, it is difficult to distinguish the individual contributions made by each. For example, the frescoes on the story of

Ernst Barlach (2 January 1870 – 24 October 1938) was a German expressionist sculptor, printmaker and writer. Although he was a supporter of the war in the years leading to World War I, his participation in the war made him change his position, and he is mostly known for his sculptures protesting against the war. This created many conflicts during the rise of the Nazi Party, when most of his works were confiscated as degenerate art.
Barlach was born in Wedel, Holstein as the oldest of the four sons of Johanna Luise Barlach and Dr Georg Barlach. He attended primary school in Ratzeburg. It was during this period that his father died, early in 1884.
Barlach studied from 1888 to 1891 at the Gewerbeschule Hamburg. Due to his artistic talent, he continued his studies at the Königliche Akademie der bildenden Künste zu Dresden (Royal Art School Dresden) as a student of Robert Diez between 1891 and 1895. He created his first major sculpture during this time, Die Krautpflückerin (The Herb Plucker). He continued his studies for one more year in Paris at the Académie Julian, but remained critical of the German tendency to copy the style of French artists. Nevertheless he returned to Paris again

Julius Shulman (October 10, 1910 – July 15, 2009) was an American architectural photographer best known for his photograph "Case Study House #22, Los Angeles, 1960. Pierre Koenig, Architect." The house is also known as The Stahl House. Shulman's photography spread California Mid-century modern around the world. Through his many books, exhibits and personal appearances his work ushered in a new appreciation for the movement beginning in the 1990s.
His vast library of images currently reside at the Getty Center in Los Angeles. His contemporaries include Ezra Stoller and Hedrich Blessing Photographers. In 1947, Julius Shulman asked architect Raphael Soriano to build a mid-century steel home and studio in the Hollywood Hills.
Some of his architectural photographs, like the iconic shots of Frank Lloyd Wright's or Pierre Koenig's remarkable structures, have been published countless times. The brilliance of buildings like those by Charles Eames, as well as those of his close friends, Richard Neutra and Raphael Soriano, was first brought to light by Shulman's photography. The clarity of his work demanded that architectural photography had to be considered as an independent art form. Each

Lala Deen Dayal (Punjabi: ਲਾਲਾ ਦੀਨ ਦਯਾਲ; 1844–1905) (also known as Raja Deen Dayal) was a Indian photographer. His career began in the mid-1870s as a commissioned photographer; eventually he set up studios in Indore, Mumbai and Hyderbad. He became the court photographer to the sixth Nizam of Hyderabad, Mahbub Ali Khan, Asif Jah VI, who awarded him the title Musawwir Jung Raja Bahadur, and he was appointed as the photographer to the Viceroy of India in 1885.
He received the Royal Warrant from Queen Victoria in 1897.
Deen Dayal was born in Sardhana, Uttar Pradesh, near Meerut in a family of jewellers. He received technical training at Thompson College of Civil Engineering at Roorkee (now IIT Roorkee) in 1966 as an engineer in lower subbordinate class.
In 1866, Deen Dayal entered government service as head estimator and draughtsman in the Department of Works Secretariat Office in Indore. Meanwhile he took up photography. His first patron in Indore was Maharaja Tukoji Rao II of Indore state, who in turn introduced him to Sir Henry Daly, agent to the Governor General for Central India (1871–1881), who encourage his work, along with the Maharaja himself who encouraged him to set up his

Oskar Kokoschka (1 March 1886 – 22 February 1980) was an Austrian artist, poet and playwright best known for his intense expressionistic portraits and landscapes.
He was born in Pöchlarn, second child to Gustav and Romana Kokoschka. His older brother died in infancy in 1887; he had a sister, Berta (born in 1889) and a brother, Bohuslav (born in 1892). Oskar had a strong belief in omens, spurred by a story of a fire breaking out in Pöchlarn shortly after his mother gave birth to him. Kokoschka's life was not easy mainly due to a lack of financial help from his father. They constantly moved into smaller flats, farther and farther from the thriving center of the town. Concluding that his father was inadequate, Kokoschka drew closer to his mother; he felt that he was the head of the household and continued to support his family when he gained wealth. Kokoschka entered secondary school at Realschule, where emphasis was placed on the study of modern subjects such as science and language. Kokoschka was not interested in his subjects, as he found he only excelled in art, and spent most of his time reading classic literature during his lessons. This education of classic literature is said

Pisanello (c. 1395 – probably 1455), known professionally as Antonio di Puccio Pisano or Antonio di Puccio da Cereto, also erroneously called Vittore Pisano by Giorgio Vasari, was one of the most distinguished painters of the early Italian Renaissance and Quattrocento. He was acclaimed by poets such as Guarino da Verona and praised by humanists of his time who compared him to such illustrious names as Cimabue, Phidias and Praxiteles.
Pisanello is known for his resplendent frescoes in large murals, elegant portraits, small easel pictures, and many brilliant drawings. He is the most important commemorative portrait medallist in the first half of the 15th century.
He was employed by the Doge of Venice, the Pope in the Vatican and the courts of Verona, Ferrara, Mantua, Milan, Rimini, and by the King of Naples. He stood in high esteem of the Gonzaga and Este families.
Pisanello had many of his works wrongly ascribed to other artists such as Piero della Francesca, Albrecht Dürer and Leonardo da Vinci, to name a few. While most of his paintings have perished, a good many of his drawings and medals have survived.
Pisanello's life is somewhat shrouded in mystery. He was born between 1380

Artworks:Shelter on the Water Front, Coenties Slip, Pier 5, East River, Manhattan

Associated periods or movements:Social realism

Art Forms:Photography

Berenice Abbott (July 17, 1898 – December 9, 1991), born Bernice Abbott, was an American photographer best known for her black-and-white photography of New York City architecture and urban design of the 1930s.
Abbott was born in Springfield, Ohio and brought up there by her divorced mother. She attended the Ohio State University, but left in early 1918.
In 1918 she moved with friends from OSU to New York's Greenwich Village, where she was 'adopted' by the anarchist Hippolyte Havel. She shared an apartment on Greenwich Avenue with several others, including the writer Djuna Barnes, philosopher Kenneth Burke, and literary critic Malcolm Cowley. At first she pursued journalism, but soon became interested in theater and sculpture, perhaps because of her interaction with artists Eugene O'Neill, Man Ray and Sadakichi Hartmann. In 1919 she nearly died in the influenza pandemic.
Abbott went to Europe in 1921, spending two years studying sculpture in Paris and Berlin. During this time, she adopted the French spelling of her first name, "Berenice," at the suggestion of Djuna Barnes. In addition to her work in the visual arts, Abbott published poetry in the experimental literary journal

Bill Viola (born January 25, 1951) is a contemporary video artist. He is considered a leading figure in the generation of artists whose artistic expression depends upon electronic, sound, and image technology in New Media. His works focus on the ideas behind fundamental human experiences such as birth, death and aspects of consciousness.
Viola grew up in Queens, New York, and Westbury, New York. He attended P.S. 20 Clinton Hill School, in Flushing, where he was captain of the TV Squad. On vacation in the mountains with his family, he nearly drowned in a lake, an experience he describes as “… the most beautiful world I’ve ever seen in my life” and “without fear,” and “peaceful”
In 1973, Viola graduated from Syracuse University with a Bachelor in Fine Arts. He studied in the Experimental Studios of the College of Visual and Performing Arts, including the Synapse experimental program, which evolved into CitrusTV.
His first job on graduation was as a video technician at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse. From 1973 to 1980, he studied and performed with composer David Tudor in the new music group "Rainforest" (later called "Composers Inside Electronics"). From 1974-1976, Viola

Francesco Hayez (Italian: [ˈaːjets]; February 10, 1791 – December 21, 1881) was an Italian painter, the leading artist of Romanticism in mid-19th-century Milan, renowned for his grand historical paintings, political allegories and exceptionally fine portraits.
Hayez came from a relatively poor family from Venice. His father was of French origin while his mother, Chiara Torcella, was from Murano. The child Francesco, youngest of five sons, was brought up by his mother's sister, who had married Giovanni Binasco, a well-off shipowner and collector of art. From childhood he showed a predisposition for drawing, so his uncle apprenticed him to an art restorer. Later he became a student of the painter Francesco Maggiotto with whom he continued his studies for three years. He was admitted to the painting course of the New Academy of Fine Arts in 1806, where he studied under Teodoro Matteini. In 1809 he won a competition from the Academy of Venice for one year of study at the Accademia di San Luca in Rome. He remained in Rome until 1814, then moved to Naples where he was commissioned by Joachim Murat to paint a major work depicting Ulysses at the court of Alcinous. In the mid 1830s he

Isamu Noguchi (野口 勇, Noguchi Isamu, November 17, 1904 – December 30, 1988) was a prominent Japanese American artist and landscape architect whose artistic career spanned six decades, from the 1920s onward. Known for his sculpture and public works, Noguchi also designed stage sets for various Martha Graham productions, and several mass-produced lamps and furniture pieces, some of which are still manufactured and sold.
In 1947, Noguchi began a collaboration with the Herman Miller company, when he joined with George Nelson, Paul László and Charles Eames to produce a catalog containing what is often considered to be the most influential body of modern furniture ever produced, including the iconic Noguchi table which remains in production today His work lives on around the world and at the Noguchi Museum in New York City.
Isamu Noguchi was born in Los Angeles, the illegitimate son of Yone Noguchi, a Japanese poet who was acclaimed in the United States, and Léonie Gilmour, an American writer who edited much of Yone Noguchi's work.
Yone had ended his relationship with Gilmour earlier that year and planned to marry his true romance, The Washington Post reporter Ethel Armes. After proposing

Eugène Henri Paul Gauguin (French: [øʒɛn ɑ̃ʁi pol ɡoɡɛ̃]; 7 June 1848 – 8 May 1903) was a leading French Post-Impressionist artist who was not well appreciated until after his death. Gauguin was later recognized for his experimental use of colors and synthetist style that were distinguishably different from Impressionism. His work was influential to the French avant-garde and many modern artists, such as Pablo Picasso, and Henri Matisse. Gauguin’s art became popular after his death and many of his paintings were in the possession of Russian collector Sergei Shchukin. He was an important figure in the Symbolist movement as a painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramist, and writer. His bold experimentation with coloring led directly to the Synthetist style of modern art, while his expression of the inherent meaning of the subjects in his paintings, under the influence of the cloisonnist style, paved the way to Primitivism and the return to the pastoral. He was also an influential proponent of wood engraving and woodcuts as art forms.
Gauguin was born in Paris, France, to journalist Clovis Gauguin and Alina Maria Chazal, daughter of the proto-socialist leader Flora Tristan, a feminist

Louis-Jacques-Mandé Daguerre (18 November 1787 – 10 July 1851) was a French artist and physicist, recognized for his invention of the daguerreotype process of photography. He became known as one of the fathers of photography. Though he is most famous for his contributions to photography, he was also an accomplished painter and a developer of the diorama theatre.
Daguerre was born in Cormeilles-en-Parisis, Val-d'Oise, France. He apprenticed in architecture, theatre design, and panoramic painting with Pierre Prévost, the first French panorama painter. Exceedingly adept at his skill of theatrical illusion, he became a celebrated designer for the theatre and later came to invent the Diorama, which opened in Paris in July 1822.
In 1829, Daguerre partnered with Nicéphore Niépce, an inventor who had produced the world's first heliograph in 1822 and the first permanent camera photograph four years later. Niépce died suddenly in 1833, but Daguerre continued experimenting and evolved the process which would subsequently be known as the Daguerreotype. It has recently been discovered that Daguerre may have mislead Niepce's son about the value of the invention in order to better claim any

Albrecht Dürer (German pronunciation: [ˈalbʁɛçt ˈdyːʁɐ]; 21 May 1471 – 6 April 1528) was a German painter, printmaker, engraver, mathematician, and theorist from Nuremberg. His prints established his reputation across Europe when he was still in his twenties, and he has been conventionally regarded as the greatest artist of the Northern Renaissance ever since. His vast body of work includes altarpieces and religious works, numerous portraits and self-portraits, and copper engravings. His woodcuts, such as the Apocalypse series (1498), retain a more Gothic flavour than the rest of his work. His well-known works include the Knight, Death, and the Devil (1513), Saint Jerome in his Study (1514) and Melencolia I (1514), which has been the subject of extensive analysis and interpretation. His watercolours mark him as one of the first European landscape artists, while his ambitious woodcuts revolutionized the potential of that medium.
Dürer's introduction of classical motifs into Northern art, through his knowledge of Italian artists and German humanists, has secured his reputation as one of the most important figures of the Northern Renaissance. This is reinforced by his theoretical

François-Auguste-René Rodin (12 November 1840 – 17 November 1917), known as Auguste Rodin ( /oʊˈɡuːst roʊˈdæn/ oh-GOOST roh-DAN; French: [oɡyst ʁɔdɛ̃]), was a French sculptor. Although Rodin is generally considered the progenitor of modern sculpture, he did not set out to rebel against the past. He was schooled traditionally, took a craftsman-like approach to his work, and desired academic recognition, although he was never accepted into Paris's foremost school of art.
Sculpturally, Rodin possessed a unique ability to model a complex, turbulent, deeply pocketed surface in clay. Many of his most notable sculptures were roundly criticized during his lifetime. They clashed with the predominant figure sculpture tradition, in which works were decorative, formulaic, or highly thematic. Rodin's most original work departed from traditional themes of mythology and allegory, modeled the human body with realism, and celebrated individual character and physicality. Rodin was sensitive to the controversy surrounding his work, but refused to change his style. Successive works brought increasing favor from the government and the artistic community.
From the unexpected realism of his first major

Daniella Cicarelli Lemos (born November 6, 1978) is a former TV show hostess for MTV Brazil and fashion model. She was engaged to Brazilian footballer Ronaldo for three months in 2005.
In September 2006, a video of Cicarelli having sex with her boyfriend on a beach in Tarifa, Spain was shot by paparazzo Miguel Temprano and broadcast on the TV show Dolce Vita on the Spanish station Telecinco. The video was spread around the internet, with Cicarelli was granted legal injunctions against YouTube and other websites, leading to several Brazilian ISPs blocking YouTube. In January 2007 after a legal decision, YouTube was blocked in Brazil for two days, resulting in 5.7 million users being blocked. This decision was criticized by internet watch groups. This happened when Cicarelli worked as a host on MTV Brazil, provoking a torrent of nearly 80,000 emails protesting against the blockade and her legal actions. Some people even went to the building of the TV station to protest.
In 2007, YouTube won the case, based on the fact that there is no expectation of privacy on a public beach. Cicarelli appealed and in 2008 the Supreme Court of the state of São Paulo changed the decision, based on the

Felice Beato (1832 – 29 January 1909), also known as Felix Beato, was an Italian–British photographer. He was one of the first people to take photographs in East Asia and one of the first war photographers. He is noted for his genre works, portraits, and views and panoramas of the architecture and landscapes of Asia and the Mediterranean region. Beato's travels gave him the opportunity to create images of countries, people, and events that were unfamiliar and remote to most people in Europe and North America. His work provides images of such events as the Indian Rebellion of 1857 and the Second Opium War, and represents the first substantial oeuvre of photojournalism. He had an impact on other photographers, and his influence in Japan, where he taught and worked with numerous other photographers and artists, was particularly deep and lasting.
A death certificate discovered in 2009 shows that Beato was born in Venice in 1832 and died on 29 January 1909 in Florence. The death certificate also indicates that he was a British subject and a bachelor. It is likely that early in his life Beato and his family moved to Corfu, at the time part of the British protectorate of the Ionian

John Constable (11 June 1776 – 31 March 1837) was an English Romantic painter. Born in Suffolk, he is known principally for his landscape paintings of Dedham Vale, the area surrounding his home—now known as "Constable Country"—which he invested with an intensity of affection. "I should paint my own places best", he wrote to his friend John Fisher in 1821, "painting is but another word for feeling".
His most famous paintings include Dedham Vale of 1802 and The Hay Wain of 1821. Although his paintings are now among the most popular and valuable in British art, he was never financially successful and did not become a member of the establishment until he was elected to the Royal Academy at the age of 52. He sold more paintings in France than in his native England.
John Constable was born in East Bergholt, a village on the River Stour in Suffolk, to Golding and Ann (Watts) Constable. His father was a wealthy corn merchant, owner of Flatford Mill in East Bergholt and, later, Dedham Mill in Essex. Golding Constable also owned his own small ship, The Telegraph, which he moored at Mistley on the Stour estuary and used to transport corn to London. He was a cousin of the London tea merchant,

László Moholy-Nagy (Hungarian pronunciation: [ˈlɑ̈ːsloː ˈmoholiˌnɒɟ]; July 20, 1895 – November 24, 1946) was a Hungarian painter and photographer as well as professor in the Bauhaus school. He was highly influenced by constructivism and a strong advocate of the integration of technology and industry into the arts.
Moholy-Nagy was born László Weisz in Bácsborsód to a Jewish-Hungarian family. His cousin was the conductor Sir Georg Solti. He attended Gymnasium (academic high school) in the city of Szeged. He changed his German-Jewish surname to the Magyar surname of his mother's Christian lawyer friend Nagy, who supported the family and helped raise Moholy-Nagy and his brothers when their Jewish father, Lipót Weisz left the family. Later, he added “Moholy” ("from Mohol") to his surname, after the name of the Hungarian town Mohol in which he grew up. One part of his boyhood was spent in the Hungarian Ada town, near Mohol in family house. In 1918 he formally converted to the Hungarian Reformed Church (Calvinist); his Godfather was his Roman Catholic university friend, the art critic Ivan Hevesy. Immediately before and during World War I he studied law in Budapest and served in the war,

Louis Désiré Blanquart-Evrard (2 August 1802, Lille – 28 April 1872, Lille) was a French cloth merchant by trade, but in the 1840s became a student of photography. He studied the Calotype process, and in 1847 became the first person to publish the process in France. He developed a method of bathing the paper in solutions of potassium iodide and silver nitrate rather than brushing these chemical baths on the surface.
In 1850, he developed and introduced the albumen paper printing technique, which became the staple process of the soon to be popular Carte de visite. In 1851 in Lille, France, with Hippolyte Fockedey, he started the Imprimerie Photographique, which was the first large scale printing company to employ a large number of employees. In the 1850s he was known for publishing other artists works, including John Stewart's views of the Pyrenees and Auguste Saltzmann's views of Jerusalem. His process for the calotype had the disadvantage of leaving a blank white sky and dark foreground, which led to artist manipulating and using multiple negatives to add clouds to the sky and make the foreground more distinct. The problem with these manipulations was that often the clouds were

Louise Joséphine Bourgeois (French pronunciation: [lwiz buʁʒwa]; 25 December 1911 – 31 May 2010), was a renowned French-American artist and sculptor, best known for her contributions to both modern and contemporary art, and for her spider structures, titled Maman, which resulted in her being nicknamed the Spiderwoman. In 2011 one of her Spider works sold for $10.7 million, a new record price for the artist at auction, and the highest price paid for a work by a woman artist.
She is recognized today as the founder of confessional art.
In the late 1940s, after moving to New York City with her American husband, Robert Goldwater, she turned to sculpture. Though her works are abstract, they are suggestive of the human figure and express themes of betrayal, anxiety, and loneliness. Her work was wholly autobiographical, inspired by her childhood trauma of discovering that her English governess was also her father’s mistress.
Bourgeois was born on 25 December 1911 in Paris, France. She was the middle child of three born to parents Josephine Fauriaux and Louis Bourgeois. Her parents owned a gallery that dealt primarily in antique tapestries. A few years after her birth, her family moved out

Tintoretto (Italian pronunciation: [tintoˈretto]; September 29, 1518 – May 31, 1594), real name Jacopo Comin, was a Venetian painter and a notable exponent of the Renaissance school. For his phenomenal energy in painting he was termed Il Furioso. His work is characterized by its muscular figures, dramatic gestures and bold use of perspective in the Mannerist style, while maintaining color and light typical of the Venetian School.
In his youth, Tintoretto was also known as Jacopo Robusti as his father had defended the gates of Padua in a rather robust way against the imperial troops during the War of the League of Cambrai (1509–1516). His real name "Comin" has only recently been discovered by Miguel Falomir, the curator of the Museo del Prado, Madrid, and was made public on the occasion of the retrospective of Tintoretto at the Prado in 2007. Comin translates to the spice cumin in the local language.
Tintoretto was born in Venice in 1518, as the eldest of 21 children. His father, Giovanni, was a dyer, or tintore; hence the son got the nickname of Tintoretto, little dyer, or dyer's boy, which is anglicized as Tintoret. The family originated from Brescia, in Lombardy, then part of the

William Hogarth (10 November 1697 – 26 October 1764) was an English painter, printmaker, pictorial satirist, social critic and editorial cartoonist who has been credited with pioneering western sequential art. His work ranged from realistic portraiture to comic strip-like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects". Knowledge of his work is so pervasive that satirical political illustrations in this style are often referred to as "Hogarthian."
William Hogarth was born at Bartholomew Close in London to Richard Hogarth, a poor Latin school teacher and textbook writer, and Anne Gibbons. In his youth he was apprenticed to the engraver Ellis Gamble in Leicester Fields, where he learned to engrave trade cards and similar products. Young Hogarth also took a lively interest in the street life of the metropolis and the London fairs, and amused himself by sketching the characters he saw. Around the same time, his father, who had opened an unsuccessful Latin-speaking coffee house at St John's Gate, was imprisoned for debt in Fleet Prison for five years. Hogarth never spoke of his father's imprisonment.
He became a member of the Rose and Crown Club, with Peter Tillemans, George Vertue,

Rembrandt Harmenszoon van Rijn (Dutch pronunciation: [ˈrɛmbrɑnt ˈɦɑrmə(n)soːn vɑn ˈrɛin], 15 July 1606 – 4 October 1669) was a Dutch painter and etcher. He is generally considered one of the greatest painters and printmakers in European art history and the most important in Dutch history. His contributions to art came in a period of great wealth and cultural achievement that historians call the Dutch Golden Age when Dutch Golden Age painting, although in many ways antithetical to the Baroque style that dominated Europe, was extremely prolific and innovative.
Having achieved youthful success as a portrait painter, Rembrandt's later years were marked by personal tragedy and financial hardships. Yet his etchings and paintings were popular throughout his lifetime, his reputation as an artist remained high, and for twenty years he taught many important Dutch painters. Rembrandt's greatest creative triumphs are exemplified especially in his portraits of his contemporaries, self-portraits and illustrations of scenes from the Bible. His self-portraits form a unique and intimate biography, in which the artist surveyed himself without vanity and with the utmost sincerity.
In his paintings

Frank Stella (born May 12, 1936) is an Italian American painter and printmaker, noted for his work in the areas of minimalism and post-painterly abstraction.
Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts, to parents of Italian descent. After attending high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, he attended Princeton University, where he majored in history and met Darby Bannard and Michael Fried. Early visits to New York art galleries influenced his artist development, and his work was influenced by the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline. Stella moved to New York in 1958, after his graduation. He is one of the most well-regarded postwar American painters still working today. Frank Stella has reinvented himself in consecutive bodies of work over the course of his five-decade career. Notably, he is heralded for creating abstract paintings that bear no pictorial illusions or psychological or metaphysical references in twentieth-century painting.
Upon moving to New York City, he reacted against the expressive use of paint by most painters of the abstract expressionist movement, instead finding himself drawn towards the "flatter" surfaces of Barnett

Jean Frédéric Bazille (December 6, 1841 – November 28, 1870) was a French Impressionist painter. Many of Bazille's major works are examples of figure painting in which Bazille placed the subject figure within a landscape painted en plein air.
Frédéric Bazille was born in Montpellier, Hérault, Languedoc-Roussillon, France, into a wealthy Protestant family. He became interested in painting after seeing some works of Eugène Delacroix. His family agreed to let him study painting, but only if he also studied medicine.
Bazille began studying medicine in 1859, and moved to Paris in 1862 to continue his studies. There he met Pierre-Auguste Renoir and Alfred Sisley, was drawn to Impressionist painting, and began taking classes in Charles Gleyre's studio. After failing his medical exam in 1864, he began painting full-time. His close friends included Claude Monet, Alfred Sisley, and Édouard Manet. Bazille was generous with his wealth, and helped support his less fortunate associates by giving them space in his studio and materials to use.
Bazille was just twenty-three years old when he painted several of his best known works, including The Pink Dress (ca. 1864, Musée d'Orsay, Paris). This

Arthur John Bridgeman ARCA, FRBS, FRBSA (2 February 1916 – 29 December 2004) was an English sculptor.
Born in Felixstowe, Suffolk and named Arthur John, he was usually called 'Bridge' by his friends and signed himself John Bridgeman. He joined Colchester School of Art at the age of 14 and went on from there to the Royal College of Art where he studied with Frank Dobson. His first love was painting, and it was during this period that he produced may gouache paintings and pastels in a Romantic style celebrating the English countryside. After the war he was awarded the British School at Rome Scholarship, but did not take this up going on to work with Misha Black and then on the Dome of Discovery for the Festival of Britain. After a spell as head of sculpture at Carlisle School of Art he succeeded William Bloye as head of Sculpture at Birmingham School of Art where he worked until retirement in 1981.
His work was popular with both private and municipal patrons and he contributed particularly to the regeneration of Birmingham after the war through the creation of a number of iconic pieces of public art. He also created play sculptures for children in the new council estates which were

Berthe Morisot (January 14, 1841 – March 2, 1895) was a painter and a member of the circle of painters in Paris who became known as the Impressionists. She was described by Gustave Geffroy in 1894 as one of "les trois grandes dames" of Impressionism alongside Marie Bracquemond and Mary Cassatt.
In 1864, she exhibited for the first time in the highly esteemed Salon de Paris. Sponsored by the government, and judged by academicians, the Salon was the official, annual exhibition of the Académie des beaux-arts in Paris. Her work was selected for exhibition in six subsequent Salons until, in 1874, she joined the "rejected" Impressionists in the first of their own exhibitions, which included Paul Cézanne, Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir, and Alfred Sisley. It was held at the studio of the photographer Nadar.
She became the sister-in-law of her friend and colleague, Édouard Manet, when she married his brother, Eugène.
Morisot was born in Bourges, Cher, France, into a successful bourgeois family. According to family tradition, the family had included one of the most prolific Rococo painters of the ancien régime, Fragonard, whose handling of color and

Edgar Degas (US /deɪˈɡɑː/ or UK /ˈdeɪɡɑː/; French: [ilɛʁ ʒɛʁmɛ̃ ɛdɡɑʁ dəɡɑ]; born Hilaire-Germain-Edgar De Gas, 19 July 1834 – 27 September 1917), was a French artist famous for his work in painting, sculpture, printmaking and drawing. He is regarded as one of the founders of Impressionism although he rejected the term, and preferred to be called a realist. A superb draftsman, he is especially identified with the subject of dance, and over half of his works depict dancers. These display his mastery in the depiction of movement, as do his racecourse subjects and female nudes. His portraits are notable for their psychological complexity and depiction of human isolation.
Early in his career, he wanted to be a history painter, a calling for which he was well prepared by his rigorous academic training and close study of classic art. In his early thirties, he changed course, and by bringing the traditional methods of a history painter to bear on contemporary subject matter, he became a classical painter of modern life.
Degas was born in Paris, France, the oldest of five children of Célestine Musson De Gas, a Creole from New Orleans, and Augustin De Gas, a banker. The family was

Sir Edwin Henry Landseer, RA (7 March 1802 – 1 October 1873) was an English painter, well known for his paintings of animals—particularly horses, dogs and stags. The best known of Landseer's works, however, are sculptures: the lions in Trafalgar Square, London.
Landseer was born in London, the son of the engraver John Landseer A.R.A... He was something of a prodigy whose artistic talents were recognised early on. He studied under several artists, including his father, and the history painter Benjamin Robert Haydon, who encouraged the young Landseer to perform dissections in order to fully understand animal musculature and skeletal structure. Landseer's life was entwined with the Royal Academy. At the age of just 13, in 1815, he exhibited works there. He was elected an Associate at the age of 24, and an Academician five years later in 1831. He was knighted in 1850, and although elected President in 1866 he declined the invitation.
In his late 30s Landseer suffered what is now believed to be a substantial nervous breakdown, and for the rest of his life was troubled by recurring bouts of melancholy, hypochondria, and depression, often aggravated by alcohol and drug use. In the last

Ferdinand Victor Eugène Delacroix (French: [ø.ʒɛn də.la.kʁwa]; 26 April 1798 – 13 August 1863) was a French Romantic artist regarded from the outset of his career as the leader of the French Romantic school. Delacroix's use of expressive brushstrokes and his study of the optical effects of colour profoundly shaped the work of the Impressionists, while his passion for the exotic inspired the artists of the Symbolist movement. A fine lithographer, Delacroix illustrated various works of William Shakespeare, the Scottish writer Walter Scott and the German writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.
In contrast to the Neoclassical perfectionism of his chief rival Ingres, Delacroix took for his inspiration the art of Rubens and painters of the Venetian Renaissance, with an attendant emphasis on colour and movement rather than clarity of outline and carefully modeled form. Dramatic and romantic content characterized the central themes of his maturity, and led him not to the classical models of Greek and Roman art, but to travel in North Africa, in search of the exotic. Friend and spiritual heir to Théodore Géricault, Delacroix was also inspired by Lord Byron, with whom he shared a strong

Giovanni Bellini (c. 1430–1516) was an Italian Renaissance painter, probably the best known of the Bellini family of Venetian painters. His father was Jacopo Bellini, his brother was Gentile Bellini, and his brother-in-law was Andrea Mantegna. He is considered to have revolutionized Venetian painting, moving it towards a more sensuous and colouristic style. Through the use of clear, slow-drying oil paints, Giovanni created deep, rich tints and detailed shadings. His sumptuous coloring and fluent, atmospheric landscapes had a great effect on the Venetian painting school, especially on his pupils Giorgione and Titian.
Giovanni Bellini was born in Venice. He was brought up in his father's house, and always lived and worked in the closest fraternal relation with his brother Gentile. Up until the age of nearly thirty we find in his work a depth of religious feeling and human pathos which is his own. His paintings from the early period are all executed in the old tempera method; the scene is softened by a new and beautiful effect of romantic sunrise color (see for example, the St. Jerome at left).
In a somewhat changed and more personal manner, with less harshness of contour and a

Giuseppe Arcimboldo (Italian pronunciation: [dʒuˈzɛppe artʃimˈbɔldo]; also spelled Arcimboldi) (1527 – July 11, 1593) was an Italian painter best known for creating imaginative portrait heads made entirely of such objects as fruits, vegetables, flowers, fish, and books – that is, he painted representations of these objects on the canvas arranged in such a way that the whole collection of objects formed a recognizable likeness of the portrait subject.
His father, Biagio Arcimboldo, was an artist. Like his father, Giuseppe Arcimboldo started his career as a designer for stained glasses and frescoes at local cathedrals when he was 21 years old.
In 1562 he became court portraitist to Ferdinand I at the Habsburg court in Vienna, and later, to Maximilian II and his son Rudolf II at the court in Prague. He was also the court decorator and costume designer. King Augustus of Saxony, who visited Vienna in 1570 and 1573, saw Arcimboldo's work and commissioned a copy of his "The Four Seasons" which incorporates his own monarchic symbols.
Arcimboldo's conventional work, on traditional religious subjects, has fallen into oblivion, but his portraits of human heads made up of vegetables, plants,

Hans Haacke (born August 12, 1936) is a German-American artist who lives and works in New York.
Haacke was born in Cologne, Germany. He studied at the Staatliche Werkakademie in Kassel, Germany, from 1956 to 1960. He was a student of Stanley William Hayter, a well-known and influential English printmaker, draftsman, and painter. From 1961 to 1962 he studied on a Fulbright grant at the Tyler School of Art at Temple University in Philadelphia. From 1967 to 2002 Haacke was a professor at the Cooper Union in New York City.
During his formative years in Germany, he was a member of Zero (an international group of artist, active ca. 1957-1966). This group was held together with common motivations: the longing to re-harmonize man and nature and to restore art's metaphysical dimension. They sought to organize the pictorial surface without using traditional devices.
Although their methods differed greatly, most of the work was monochromatic, geometric, kinetic, and gestural. But most of all they used nontraditional materials such as industrial materials, fire and water, light, and kinetic effects. The influence of the Zero group and the materials they used is clear in Haacke's early work

Harold F. Clayton (Born May, 1954) is a noted sculptor and stone-carver, best known for several sets of life-size sculptures of cows on display at various public sites in Texas.
Initially interested in painting, Clayton studied art at the Massachusetts College of Art in Boston, Massachusetts and the University of North Texas in Denton, Texas, graduating cum laude with a BFA in 1977. He moved to stone as a medium, and spent the years from 1982 to 1987 in Pietrasanta, Italy, studying carving in the studio of Sem Ghelardini.
While still in Italy, Clayton accepted a commission for four sets of five marble cows from for the Trammell Crow Company, a large Dallas real estate development concern. Three of the sets now stand in Texas at the Arboretum at Great Hills in Austin, at Las Colinas in Irving, and at Trinity Lake Park in Dallas. The fourth set is in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. A sculpture of a half completed cow, emerging from stone, sits in Clayton's front yard in Dallas.
The cows at these sites stand where live cows actually grazed in the recent past. In fact, the models for the sculptures were made in 1980 from cows standing on the hill where the Las Colinas cows now appear to graze.

Ian Hamilton Finlay, CBE, (28 October 1925 – 27 March 2006) was a Scottish poet, writer, artist and gardener.
Finlay was born in Nassau, Bahamas, of Scottish parents. He was educated at Dollar Academy, in Clackmannanshire. At the age of 13, with the outbreak of the Second World War, he was evacuated to family in the countryside. In 1942, he joined the British Army.
At the end of the war, Finlay worked as a shepherd, before beginning to write short stories and poems, while living on Rousay, in Orkney. He published books including The Sea Bed and Other Stories (1958) and The Dancers Inherit the Party (1960) (which was included in its entirety in a New Directions annual a few years later), and some of his work was broadcast by the BBC.
In 1963, Finlay published Rapel, his first collection of concrete poetry (poetry in which the layout and typography of the words contributes to its overall effect), and it was as a concrete poet that he first gained wide renown. Much of this work was issued through his own Wild Hawthorn Press. Eventually he began to compose poems to be inscribed into stone, incorporating these sculptures into the natural environment.
This kind of 'poem-object' features

Jan Matejko ( Polish pronunciation (help·info)) (also known as Jan Mateyko; June 24, 1838 – November 1, 1893) was a Polish painter known for paintings of notable historical Polish political and military events. His most famous works include oil on canvas paintings like Battle of Grunwald, paintings of numerous other battles and court scenes, and a gallery of Polish kings. He is counted among the most famous Polish painters.
Matejko born on June 24, 1838 in the Free City of Kraków. His father, Franciszek Ksawery Matejko (Czech: František Xaver Matějka) (born 1789 or 13 January 1793, died 26 October 1860), a Czech from the village of Roudnice, was a graduate of the Hradec Králové school; who later became a tutor and music teacher. He first worked for the Wodzicki family in Kościelniki, Poland, then moved to Kraków, where he married the half-German, half-Polish Joanna Karolina Rossberg. Jan was the ninth child from eleven that his parents had. After the death of his mother in 1846, Jan and his siblings were taken care of by his aunt, Anna Zamojska.
From his earliest days Matejko showed exceptional artistic talent that allowed him to advance from grade to grade, although he had great

Joan Miró i Ferrà (Catalan pronunciation: [ʒuˈam miˈɾo]) (April 20, 1893 – December 25, 1983) was a Spanish Catalan painter, sculptor, and ceramicist born in Barcelona. A museum dedicated to his work, the Fundació Joan Miró, was established in his birth city in 1975.
Earning international acclaim, his work has been interpreted as Surrealism, a sandbox for the subconscious mind, a re-creation of the childlike, and a manifestation of Catalan pride. In numerous interviews dating from the 1930s onwards, Miró expressed contempt for conventional painting methods as a way of supporting bourgeois society, and famously declared an "assassination of painting" in favour of upsetting the visual elements of established painting.
Born to the families of a goldsmith and a cabinet-maker, he grew up in the Barri Gòtic neighborhood of Barcelona. His father was Miquel Miró Adzerias and his mother was Dolores Ferrà. He began drawing classes at the age of seven at a private school at Carrer del Regomir 13, a medieval mansion. In 1907 he enrolled at the fine art academy at La Llotja, to the dismay of his father. He studied at the Cercle Artístic de Sant Lluc and he had his first solo show in 1918 at the

Juan Luna y Novicio (October 23, 1857 — December 7, 1899) was an Ilocano Filipino painter, sculptor and a political activist of the Philippine Revolution during the late 19th century. He became one of the first recognized Philippine artists.
His winning the gold medal in the 1884 Madrid Exposition of Fine Arts, along with the silver win of fellow Filipino painter Félix Resurrección Hidalgo, prompted a celebration which was a major highlight in the memoirs of members of the Propaganda Movement, with the fellow Ilustrados toasting to the two painters' good health and to the brotherhood between Spain and the Philippines.
Regarded for work done in the manner of the Spanish and French academies of his time, Luna painted literary and historical scenes, some with an underscore of political commentary. His allegorical works were inspired with classical balance, and often showed figures in theatrical poses.
Born in the town of Badoc, Ilocos Norte in the northern Philippines, Juan Luna was the third among the seven children of Don Joaquin Luna de San Pedro y Posadas and Doña Laureana Novicio y Ancheta. In 1861, the Luna family moved to Manila and he went to Ateneo Municipal de Manila where

Lee Brown Coye (July 24, 1907 – September 5, 1981) was an American artist.
Coye is probably best remembered for his black-and-white illustrations for pulp magazines and horror fiction, but he produced many other works in other media.
Coye was born in Syracuse, New York, and as a young man lived in nearby Tully. He spent his entire life in the Central New York area.
He and his wife, Ruth, lived in Syracuse for many years where Coye's activities included teaching adult art classes; working under the Works Progress Administration to paint a mural in the Cazenovia High School in 1934 (since destroyed); advertising for the WSYR Broadcasting System in upstate New York, producing a variety of commissioned works.
The Coyes settled in Hamilton, New York, in 1959 when Lee went to work for Sculptura, a small company that reproduced antique sculptures. The move to Hamilton allowed Coye to fulfill his ambition of returning to a small town and maintaining his own art studio.
Coye was almost entirely self-taught as an artist, and his entire life was devoted to art-related work. As a young man, he attended one semester of night art classes, but his artistic knowledge and abilities came from many

Lorna Simpson (born 1960) is an African American artist and photographer who made her name in the 1980s and 1990s with artworks such as Guarded Conditions and Square Deal.
Born in Brooklyn, New York, she attended the High School of Art and Design and the School of Visual Arts in New York, and then the University of California, San Diego. Her earliest work was as a documentary street photographer, before moving her observations of race and society into her studio. Simpson began exploring ethnic divisions in the 1980s era of multiculturalism. Her most notable works combine words with photographs of anonymously cropped images of women and occasionally men. While the pictures may appear straightforward, the text will often confront the viewer with the underlying racism still found in American culture.
Simpson's 1989 work, Necklines, shows two circular and identical photographs of a black woman's mouth, chin, neck, and collar bone. The white text, “ring, surround, lasso, noose, eye, areola, halo, cuffs, collar, loop”, individual words on black plaques, imply menace, binding or worse. The final phrase, text on red “feel the ground sliding from under you,” openly suggests lynching, though

Nicolae Tonitza (Romanian pronunciation: [nikoˈla.e toˈnit͡sa]; April 13, 1886 – February 27, 1940) was a Romanian painter, engraver, lithographer, journalist and art critic. Drawing inspiration from Post-impressionism and Expressionism, he had a major role in introducing modernist guidelines to local art.
Born in Bârlad, he left his home town in 1902 in order to attend the Iaşi National School of Fine Arts, where he had among his teachers Gheorghe Popovici and Emanoil Bardasare. The following year he visited Italy together with University of Bucharest students of archeology under the direction of Grigore Tocilescu. During that period, together with some of his fellow students, Tonitza painted the walls of Grozeşti church.
In 1908 he left for Munich, where he attended the Royal Academy of Fine Arts; he began publishing political cartoons in Furnica, and contributing art criticism articles to Arta Română. Tonitza spent the following three years in Paris, where he visited artists' studios, and studied famous paintings. Although the young artist's creation would initially conform to the prevalent style, his gift for colour and his personal touch would eventually lead him towards

Paolo Uccello (1397 – 10 December 1475), born Paolo di Dono, was an Italian painter and a mathematician who was notable for his pioneering work on visual perspective in art. Giorgio Vasari in his book Lives of the Artists wrote that Uccello was obsessed by his interest in perspective and would stay up all night in his study trying to grasp the exact vanishing point. He used perspective in order to create a feeling of depth in his paintings and not, as his contemporaries, to narrate different or succeeding stories. His best known works are the three paintings representing the battle of San Romano (for a long time these were wrongly entitled the "Battle of Sant' Egidio of 1416").
Paolo worked in the Late Gothic tradition, and emphasized colour and pageantry rather than the Classical realism that other artists were pioneering. His style is best described as idiosyncratic, and he left no school of followers. He has had some influence on twentieth century art (including the New Zealand painter Melvin Day) and literary criticism (e.g., in the "Vies imaginaires" by Marcel Schwob, "Uccello le poil" by Antonin Artaud and "O Mundo Como Ideia" by Bruno Tolentino).
The sources for Paolo

Raffaellino del Garbo (1466 or perhaps 1476–1524) was a Florentine painter of the early Renaissance.
His real name was Raffaello Capponi; Del Garbo was a nickname, bestowed upon him seemingly from the graceful nicety (garbo) of his earlier works. He has also been called Raffaello de Florentia, and Raffaello de Carolis or Karli. He was a pupil of Filippino Lippi, with whom he remained till 1490, if not later. He accompanied Filippino to Rome, where he painted the ceiling of the chapel of St. Thomas Aquinas (Caraffa Chapel) in the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva.
Among his works are a Resurrection, originally for the church of the Benedictine monastery of Monte Oliveto, now in the Accademia. He painted a Miracle of the Loaves in the refectory of the convent at Cesto. A Coronation of the Virgin is in the Louvre museum. A Madonna and child with Saints and donors was previously at the Berlin Museum. Another picture painted in the early part of his life is in the monastery of San Salvi, and is highly commended by Moreni in his Notizie istoriclie dei Contorni di Firenze. He painted a ‘‘Virgin and Child ' between SS. Francis and Zenobius and two kneeling patrons, which is (1500, and is

Robert Rauschenberg (October 22, 1925 – May 12, 2008) was an American painter and graphic artist whose early works anticipated the pop art movement. Rauschenberg is well known for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations. Rauschenberg was both a painter and a sculptor and the Combines are a combination of both, but he also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking, and performance. He was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 1993.
Rauschenberg lived and worked in New York City as well as on Captiva Island, Florida until his death from heart failure on May 12, 2008.
Rauschenberg was born as Milton Ernest Rauschenberg in Port Arthur, Texas, the son of Dora Carolina (née Matson) and Ernest R. Rauschenberg. His father was of German and Cherokee ancestry and his mother of Anglo-Saxon descent. His parents were Fundamentalist Christians. Rauschenberg studied at the Kansas City Art Institute and the Académie Julian in Paris, France, where he met the painter Susan Weil. In 1948 Rauschenberg and Weil decided to attend Black Mountain College in North Carolina.
Josef Albers, a founder of the Bauhaus, became

Théo (Théophile) van Rysselberghe (23 November 1862 – 14 December 1926) was a Belgian neo-impressionist painter, who played a pivotal role in the European art scene at the turn of the century.
Born in Ghent to a French-speaking bourgeois family, he studied first at the Academy of Ghent under Theo Canneel and from 1879 at the Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts in Brussels under the directorship of Jean-François Portaels. The North African paintings of Portaels had started an orientalist fashion in Belgium. Their impact would strongly influence the young Théo van Rysselberghe. Between 1882 and 1888 he made three trips to Morocco, staying there a total of one year and half.
Barely 18 years old, he already participated at the Salon of Ghent, showing two portraits. Soon afterwards followed his Self-portrait with pipe (1880), painted in somber colours in the Belgian realistic tradition of that time. His Child in an open spot of the forest (1880) already departs from this style and he sets his first steps towards impressionism. Yet soon he would develop his own realistic style, close to impressionism. In 1881 he exhibited for the first time at the Salon in Brussels.
The next year he travelled

Thomas Cole (February 1, 1801 – February 11, 1848) was an English-born American artist. He is regarded as the founder of the Hudson River School, an American art movement that flourished in the mid-19th century. Cole's Hudson River School, as well as his own work, was known for its realistic and detailed portrayal of American landscape and wilderness, which feature themes of romanticism and naturalism.
He was born in Bolton, Lancashire, England, in 1801. In 1818 his family emigrated to the United States, settling in Steubenville, Ohio, where Cole learned the rudiments of his profession from a wandering portrait painter named Stein. However, he had little success painting portraits, and his interest shifted to landscape. Moving to Pittsburgh in 1823 and then to Philadelphia in 1824, where he drew from casts at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, he rejoined his parents and sister in New York City early in 1825.
In New York Cole sold five paintings to George W. Bruen, who financed a summer trip to the Hudson Valley where the artist produced two Views of Coldspring, the Catskill Mountain House and painted famous Kaaterskill Falls and the ruins of Fort Putnam. Returning to New

Valentin de Boulogne (3 January 1591 – 19 August 1632), sometimes referred to as Le Valentin, was a French painter.
Valentin was born in Coulommiers, France, where he was baptised in the parish of Saint-Denys on January 3, 1591, making 1590 his likely year of birth. The family name, also spelled Boullogne and Boulongne, appears to originate from Boulogne-sur-Mer, a city in northern France in the colony of Pas-de-Calais, though the family had dwelt at Coulommiers since at least 1489. His father, also named Valentin, and his uncle Jean were both painters.
It can be presumed that Valentin would have first started painting in his father's studio prior to moving to Paris or Fontainebleau, and before leaving for Italy. The first specific mention of Valentin's being there in Italy is in the stati d'anime for 1620, when he was living in the parish of Santa Maria del Popolo. Prior to that date it can only be speculated on his whereabouts and activities.
While studying in Italy, Valentin was under the influence of Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio and Bartolomeo Manfredi, and studying under Simon Vouet. Who Valentin idolized and who he worked on, shows repeatedly in his own work.

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